


Winter Falling

by ScarlettsLetters



Series: Winter Falling [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Anal Sex, BDSM, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Gets Wrecked, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Dom Thor (Marvel), Dom/sub, F/M, Foreplay, M/M, Multiple Orgasms, Oral Sex, Orgasm Delay, Porn With Plot, Protective Thor (Marvel), Thor (Marvel) is Not Stupid, Threesome - F/M/M, Wet & Messy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 03:49:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13849461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScarlettsLetters/pseuds/ScarlettsLetters
Summary: Hydra taught the Winter Soldier to associate intimacy with pain and punishment. A kernel of his conditioning survived after his return from Wakanda. His programming strikes every time he fantasizes about Steve Rogers or tries to get close to Natasha. How can he ever lead a normal life when deprived of a fundamental aspect of himself?In a moment of despair, Bucky confesses his situation to his gorgeous blond boss. He receives a proposal: an unorthodox solution to break the conditioning with a night of intense sex and training. Sound impossible? Little does Bucky know his boss is the prince of Asgard, Thor, and Thor will do all in his power to give Bucky, Steve, and Natasha the future they deserve.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At four-thirty, he ought to be passed out from exhaustion. His mind refuses to settle. Half-hearted efforts to focus keep slithering away into a mess of empty frustration. All he can conjure after repeated efforts to center himself involves the strapping blond war hero giving him that look of longing. Those blue eyes settled on him as he goes to his knees, and the clear, burning need to belong.
> 
> To be whole.
> 
> Tomorrow, he decides. He will act tomorrow. If he doesn't, the torment of his stifled passions is going to kill him quicker than any bullet.

Pretending to have a real life, any kind of mundane routine, doesn’t fall into place overnight. Weeks since he literally came in from the cold, and Bucky Barnes still has to occasionally pinch himself -- fine, every hour or so -- to affirm the apartment, the clothes on his back, and the company he keeps are real.

Not a story conjured up by a broken corner of his mind to cope with the indignities and depravities  conducted around him.

“I think a job could be good for you, Buck.”

Steve drops the statement while they share dinner at the kitchen table, sandwiches from Katz’s Deli just like they used to get. Thick slabs of corned beef drip on marbled rye fat as a man’s finger.

Bucky looks up, mid-bite, and his frosty blue eyes flick left to right, casing the nearest exits. Two windows, a drop of fourteen storeys, the door out to the hall gives access to the rooftop. He already mentally indexed every access and exit point in the building and surrounding towers.

Doing his best not to let on anything is wrong, Steve picks up a napkin from the pile between their wax paper wrappers. After several failed starts, he knows when not to trigger the latent muscle memory trained into his best friend.

Wakanda performed all kinds of wonders unscrambling Bucky’s brain, but the underlying psychology is there. Shuri warned them both the path to recovery would be slow.

Miracle enough to have conversations that don’t end in blank stares or uncomfortable, frosty silences. They haven’t advanced much beyond walks around the neighbourhood to get the lay of the land and securing food. Steve wipes off his fingers.

“Not right now,” he taps the table for emphasis, “but eventually. You might think about it.”

Bucky roughly nods and takes another bite of the sandwich to avoid having to speak. He knows Steve cares _far_ more than he ever lets on. He knows that Steve stays outside reading or listening for any cries in the night, hints of distress. That he somehow magically refreshes the contents of the fridge and the cupboards, takes care of the dishes, and half a dozen other simple tasks that elude Bucky at the best of times.

Steve only wants the best for everyone, including an assassin stuffed in a frozen tube in battered shape until they could find a way to cut the kill switch.

Two months on from Wakanda, Bucky figures patience must be dwindling. An important man helping the most visible team in the world has dozens -- hundreds? -- of commitments on his time, from the absurd commercials he films for YouTube to launching himself at alien space ships with no more than the shield and serum to keep him alive.

Oh, and the regiment of self-propelled suits, an actual witch, firepower in various flavours, and of course Nat. But sooner or later, Captain Rogers’ babysitting tour of duty needs to end.

Wisps of his chestnut hair escape the ponytail he messily pulled in into, and those thin strands bob when he lowers his head.

“Yeah.”  A whisper. “Guess so.”

“Right.”

The silence cuts through crinkling paper and uneasy shifts in the chairs.

Bucky slumps even lower, face focused on the table and the deli wrapper in front of him.

It’s not that Steve suggested a bad idea. Far from it. A job brings stability and an income, a regular purpose stamped into the usual nine-to-five routine he hasn’t experienced for more than eighty years.

Uncertainty snaps around his mind tighter and Bucky can’t even find the words for a sentence. His jaw flexes. How bad is it that he sees _nothing_ when he imagines himself in any kind of job?

The pain and reluctance almost hurt Steve, more than anything else, sliding through his bluff expression to find somewhere soft and vulnerable to lodge. He runs his palm over his cropped blond hair. Seeing anyone distressed puts him off his game, but there’s something infinitely different about Bucky. Bucky went through so much, strong as the vibranium worked into his arm, and he still has unseen fracture lines that leave him brittle and vulnerable. Faults that cannot be pushed against or the whole house comes down.

 _Maybe I’m going too fast_. He would be content to leave the matter at that, returning to his sandwich.

“How about watching the game after?” he suggests. “If we can figure out the TV.”

Bucky’s shoulders drop in relief. He nods a little, and proceeds to polish off the crust of the sandwich with a singular focus.

Rain drums off the windows in the loft as both men clean up the remnants of their lunch, tossing wrappers and crumbs into the trash.

 

* * *

 

The next three days, Bucky stays awake long into the dead hours between night and day, unable to shake the vacant, half-formed thoughts of his future.

At four-thirty, he ought to be passed out from exhaustion. His mind refuses to settle. Half-hearted efforts to focus keep slithering away into a mess of empty frustration. All he can conjure after repeated efforts involves the strapping blond war hero giving him _that look_ and his mouth bruised and warm. Nat crying out his name in smoky joy. He shudders with the need to be wanted. To be touched. 

To be whole.

He can’t bear Steve carrying ghosts and demons for him. No more of those pained lines grooved on Steve’s forehead or the hesitation before speaking or moving, like a man crossing thin ice.

 _Tomorrow_. He decides he will act tomorrow. The thought rests on his chest with a crushing weight, and no amount of tossing and turning himself senseless in the mute darkness eases the decision.

 

* * *

 

Most days now, Steve splits his time between Avengers Tower and a variety of facilities hidden around New York. Finding him used to be as easy as looking for the nearest kerfuffle. Not so much in the Information Age.

When he first came back, Bucky received a package of devices in sequential degrees of infernal construction. Sure, he understood the burner phone, the second phone, and the tablet. Three small disks supposed to act as a communication uplink through a Stark satellite for secure transmission sit abandoned in a corner of a dumpster around Tribeca. The last, a small cube, arrived a week later courtesy of Nat with her assurances any viral technology was removed.

He glares at the inoffensive black device seated on a tabletop at the cheap diner down the street. Once more he checks the perimeter and the sidewalk for any suspicious activity among the blur of commuters ring to negotiate the failing subway system and another string of delays.

A tired waitress hangs back to pour cheap coffee into mugs of discerning hipsters on a budget, and he starts for an instant. _Is that Steve?_ A glimpse of blond hair in the crowd, someone with mammoth shoulders and a certain curve to his back brings Bucky half out of his seat, knocking his knees on the table.

Creamers in a basket chatter and he catches the sticky tabletop organizer filled by sugar and various hot sauces before the whole wire shebang falls to the floor. He peers through the windows past everyone in their tight jeans and cropped jackets, a sea of humanity awash in an air of self-importance. No one familiar catches his eye.

If a near miss hasn’t rattled his nerves, seeing ghosts definitely has. This entire operation deserves to end here and now, before his idea sends out shoots.

He thumbs the square with his gloved finger before his nerve completely deserts him.

“Hello, Mr. Barnes,” FRIDAY has an unnerving cheer, something to be expected from a Stark AI. Says something about the man, really. _Stepford_ always comes to mind.

Talking to this damn square in public stands out as a thoroughly bad idea, especially as a marginally wanted man in most parts of the free world. He hasn’t mastered commanding the household devices at Steve’s place to tell him the time or weather, let alone a conversation with an actual fucking AI.

“Hi.” The sooner this is done, the better. “Send Steve a message I wanna talk about a job.”

FRIDAY acknowledges him with a hum that sets two circles on the side of the cube blinking a soothing aquamarine.

“Would you like me to update a resume for you too?” she says.

“How would you even…” Too late the words escape him, a smoky mutter she hears without difficulty.

“I can use your service record, extrapolate off your known skills in the databank and compile a list of prospective accomplishments of interest to employers. At present, I recommend a job in the law enforcement or security field, though granted your record may make the former difficult.”

“How about you don’t?”

He cups his gloved palm over the cube, the one assured way he knows silences the blathering disembodied voice projected from within. Just what he needs, the whole damn restaurant hearing about the most deadly assassin in the western world trying to find legitimate work.

 _This isn’t my shining moment_. A few coins oughta cover the cost of sitting there, a tip for being left alone.

“Message confirmed,” Friday peeps under his fingers. So much for that notion. “Steve replied. Read?”

“Yes.”

The message projected onto his arm resolves into cramped font. _Twenty minutes, Avengers Tower._

Just the place he never wants to go.

 

* * *

 

Hard to miss the tower reconstructed on the skyline of New York, a great bulbous wireframe wrapped in sparkling glass. Bucky can’t exactly rush in through the first lines of security after the bulletproof glass and doors, or the metal detectors, or the discreet scanners checking for specific chemical or organic signatures against a huge list of known threats in their databases.

Watching the endless flow of men and women returning from lunch, Steve enjoys a fantastic view over the foyer. He spots the outlier, a broad-shouldered man in the hoodie and a baseball cap, pacing through security. The regimen is old hat to the guards who process him through the system that flags him as a visitor.

The wary scan draws out a slow sigh. No way around that. Getting Bucky this far at least counts for a victory. They probably need a fast lift to an office for a conversation, rather than a conference room. He’s already mapping out possibilities before tapping the commlink on his collar to notify Friday of his needs.

Bucky shrugs the translucent visitor badge into the pocket of his coat. No comment on his metal arm means either he’s walking into the belly of the beast or Captain Rogers took certain measures. He wants to believe the latter, but his body thinks the former, tense and quick.

He spots Steve in the crowd beyond the foyer, playing it cool behind a massive support pillar. The view dries his mouth, if he’s to be honest. A man from the Forties made the leap to the modern age, impeccably grafting outdoorsman with the rugged, dressed down ease he’s always had. Steve wears dark pants skinny enough to be cool paired to a copper-flecked sweater hinting at some kind of Irish fisherman design, infinitely more subtle. The straps of his grey backpack echo the sliced harness of his usual flight and tac suits, and if Bucky didn’t know better, he might bet somehow the shield stowed up in there.

The freshened magnetism is two parts nostalgia to the elation of freedom, going out to the street without having crosshairs on your back. He stares a little too long.

When did his best friend regain that aura of command and certainty in the world? No wonder they all lionize him. Hell, Bucky does too, feeling the infinitely slow drizzle of awe tracing down the inner lining of his gut.

 _This_ , he can daydream about. How Steve might look if he went to his knees, those warm blue eyes holding his own while he unzipped those pants and took Steve in his mouth...

A spike of pain almost punches him to his knees. Experience alone keeps him upright. He survived worse. Trick is breathing, sucking in oxygen through the jittery seizure of muscles.

Voices call from far, far beyond his tunneling vision.

“Sir, are you okay?”

“You, ma’am, get over to the guard station for help.”

Bucky sways and clenches his fists at his sides, riding out the wave. Too close, they’re pushing too close to him and blocking a clear route away. Factors he calculates rapidly: running and shoving people out of the way here will bring down Stark’s hateful defenses and they aren’t bound to be gentle.

Someone else apologizes, pushing through the heaving mass. Steve says, “Ma’am, sir, pardon. Excuse me.”

The masses part for him automatically, processing only later that someone who looks an awful lot like Captain Rogers brushed past in a purposeful walk.

Faking left, Bucky pushes through the first row of watching employees, leaving behind the sea of grey suits and black skirts. The pain is receding but he cannot trust the black wave of instinct screaming to run.

 _C’mon, Buck._ Steve can hardly yell in a crowded office, not without alerting everyone in the vicinity to his presence and the brewing situation. Tactical suicide, doing anything that induces a churn of activity around a man in a stress fugue, much less a pursuit. All he needs right now is a chance to find somewhere quiet where he can talk Bucky down and banish the imminent danger. “FRIDAY, comms blackout.”

“Yes, Captain,” she says.

He ignores the phones being pulled out and the rueful comments when intrepid amateur journalists find their signals dead or the operating systems spontaneously rebooting. The interruption blankets the foyer and gives a little cover from videos reposted in seconds.

Following the retreating soldier around the jagged corner flanked in glass is easy, and he increases his stride to cut the distance. Few employees bother meandering down the route that leads to a couple chairs open to the street and facilities offices.

Bucky has the single-minded purpose of finding a wall to lean again, trying to catch his breath.

He turns and finds Steve silhouetted against the warm daylight and frenetic traffic, ribbons of steel and plastic rolling behind him in tumbling drifts.

Words don’t work. He spits out, “Sorry.”

He can’t see the haggard pallor of his skin or the sweat on his brow, the pain fracturing his expression into a disfigured mask. Steve hates whatever triggered him, whatever thoroughly upended his best friend’s very existence. That man can do this to another man undermines everything he stands for.

“No sorries. You okay?”

Bucky doesn’t meet his eye. “It’ll pass.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize for anything.” Soothing words aren’t enough, for all he wants to wrap his arms around Bucky and call for Wanda to find _something_ , some solution with those inexplicable powers of hers, or call up the Doctor for them to work out a fix that finally sticks. If Wakanda isn't the answer, maybe magic will. It's about the last card he has, one he hates to consider, but the ragged breathing of a winded man and the shaking limbs are unbearable. 

He'd sooner sacrifice his own discomfort to have Bucky back. 

In the end Steve offers his hand, useless as it feels. He trapped Bucky in a corner and offers to pull him out of the dark. Is it right? His moral compass skews where it comes to James Barnes. What he thinks is best doesn't play true, especially in the face of standing by helplessly while the soldier grapples with his own demons. He steps in to add his own bulk as a barrier against the prying eyes, the curious faces turned in his direction to the commotion beyond. That need to shield and guard clouds his own certainty about how to proceed. Bucky means too much: the protector of his youth he hero-worshipped in his way, and the fearless soldier faithfully at his side while they ground step by step through Europe during the war, the ache in his heart weighing so heavily now.

“I dunno what’s going on.” Bucky lies without much hesitation, pushing aside the offered hand as he emerges from the gloom on his own. His metal fingers grip his side. “It’ll pass.”

One word would divert him into the med bay for proper examination at the cost of any trust. Steve wants more than anything to remove this sting, but the past weeks and months treated the soldier as a patient, a victim, less of a person. He can’t do that again, not staring the spectre in the face again.

Cut off the head and another grows back. HYDRA continues to bedevil them even in peacetime from thousands of miles away.

“C’mon. Let’s get somewhere quiet then, cup of coffee, and find out why you came out on your vacation, eh?” Steve tries to paste a grin.

Maybe he succeeds. Bucky doesn’t say otherwise.

 

* * *

 

“About that job.” Ice water and a damnably uncomfortable ergonomic office chair don’t fix the source of the problem, but Bucky will take what he can get as long as he can get the hell out of this bloody cursed tower and its technicians, smiling scientists, and technoserfs enslaved to the vision for a futuristic utopia.

Steve about drops his mug of coffee. He stares at the reflection in the window, that arresting face swept clean of emotion and the eyes haunted as ever. Teeth scrape over a bruised stretch of lower lip while Bucky plays it cool.

He deploys every bit of his training not to choke up or shake, planting his feet for solidity.

“You got something in mind?” he says. Sounds almost calm.

Bucky doesn’t buy it. He knows full well the nuanced expressions and the way Steve bundles up his unease behind a faint smile dented on the left side where he might chew his lip or the way his brow dips right before he smoothes out his facial features.

Propping his ankle over his knee, he stares out the window as though the blue glass and grey limestone skyscrapers hold the least interest. “Kinda hoping you had some ideas about that, you know.”

“Me?” Steve raises his eyebrow.

“You know, _he’s the man with the plan_ ,” Bucky quips back in singsong. That old USO tune never fails to make both of them cringe, and he’s satisfied to watch Steve’s serious expression crumple into a sheepish grin.

“Man, I’m never going to escape that am I?” A singing Bucky is a rare thing indeed, enough to water and nourish withered hope in the belly.

“Nope.”

Blunt fingertips rub against the corner of his jaw, and Steve struggles to keep from adding the next lines to the song. It’s going to be stuck in his head for days, bar none, and no one will ever let him live down singing _Star-Spangled Man_ in the shower.

“So.” He knows how the conversation is supposed to proceed. Days practicing with Natasha took off the expectancy or the look of raw, unbridled hope. Unacceptable, she said, the way it puts pressure on the subject. When it comes to psychological matters he tends to defer to her expertise.

Well, her and the doctor and the one at the middle of all this.

Bucky waits, the tap of his finger against the laces of his boot a dull echo.

“Guy I know has an opening, needs someone to be a jack of all trades. He runs a club in Greenwich Village.” Steve pauses, weighing out the response.

Friday’s useless recommendations come streaming back and Bucky shrinks an inch, shutting his eyes.

“Aww, c’mon, Steve. A _club_? How am I gonna fit in there, unless they want me for the bouncer?”

“No, not like that,” Steve says. He’s losing the moment. “Look, it’s not like the Vanguard or some hole in the wall filled with smoke. The place is a whole lot nicer, heck, the kind of venue where Nat or Tony go.”

“So what does this guy want?”

“Someone who can do a little of everything. Clean up, stock the cellar, maybe watch the bar now and then. Has a nose from trouble.”

There’s the rub. Whatever this hopped up idea is, Steve clearly thinks the world of it. He’s pushing like he so rarely does, speaking to the better qualities without injecting so much enthusiasm. Bucky ought to show distrust, but he squashes those instincts to follow the current.

He goes for the water glass and thinks the better of it. “Say I do this. What’s the hours? You know, I don’t even have a suit.”

“All that gets covered in your wages and benefits. Starting wages are probably like thirty bucks an hour, something like that.” Steve raises his hands. “You’d probably work it out.”

Doing the math isn’t hard. “Steve, that’s like sixty thousand…”

“Then ask for more. Forty for your skill set isn’t unreasonable. You say how much and you’re set.”

Bucky stares, open-mouthed, unable to scramble past the monolithic block in his head. “I… He doesn’t care who I am?”

Truth is golden, without the remotest hitch. Steve crosses his arms over his chest. “I vouched for you.”

“What’s the catch?”

“You show up regularly.” Steve nods to the window. “Bad days, you call in. He knows you’re a vet.”

“Does he know _who_ I am, Steve?” The matter that they circle uneasily gets shoved to the fore. Bucky feels the acid in his throat, the uneasy cramping of his stomach. This can’t be real.

“Yeah. Not an issue.”

Steve says that so casually, so easily, it defies belief. Bucky drops his foot to the floor and bolts up from the chair, hands on the table. “How is being me not an issue? Did you find a fucking saint?”

“Language, Buck.” Under the circumstances, that comes out a lot less harsh and forceful than it could. Nothing unsurprising between them. The kid who never cussed is a man who rarely swears. “He knows the story. I said, I vouched for you and he trusts my judgment. Besides, he is a vet too. You aren’t going to surprise him too much.”

Bucky curls his hand into a fist and smacks his bicep with a resonant thump, the vibranium plates absorbing the impact. “And this? A vet going on a rampage with _this_ can kill a lot of people. You had a plan for that too?”

“Yeah, I do.” Steve takes to sitting at the table, running his fingers over the smooth tabletop. “Look, you gotta keep this hush hush, but my friend and his staff aren’t run of the mill folks. You go in there, Bucky, you are going to be safe even if you have an episode. Mostly because I’ve yet to see a bullet that can hurt someone from Asgard.”

For a long, long moment, shock settles between them. Bucky hovers over the table, poised on one hand, until his knees loosen enough to let him sit back.

“ _Asgard_.”

“Asgard.” Steve even smiles, weak as it is. “Past couple of years have seen major changes. People from Asgard have started coming back. Not many. But this guy -- he’s called Erik, by the way -- thought a club might be just the ticket in New York. He and a couple of his friends came down, and it’s been a roaring success ever since. They’re big on revels in Asgard.”

Bucky tries to respond more than once, each time cutting himself off before he says something either stupid or incredibly rude. He clamps his mouth shut. Opens it again after ten painful, thorny seconds of working out something that sounds remotely human. “Asgard, like Odin’s hall and Valhalla Asgard.”

Steve nods. Sometimes even he forgets how much Bucky missed slipping in and out of life, a ghost activated long enough to complete a mission. How much vanished in the Soviet blender every time Zola’s accursed heirs got their hands on him.

“Yeah, like Valhalla. It’s hard to believe, and I’ve seen them.”

“This Erik guy.” Bucky wants out. He wants out more than sleep or food, but Steve clearly went to great pains to arrange this or else they wouldn’t be suggesting working for a mythological race at a fancy club paying way too much money for his services. “You trust him? He good?”

“With my life.” Automatic response from Steve. “The ladies, too. His staff are gents and ladies, mostly the latter. They’re sisters, kind of.”

Kind of? What isn’t he saying? Bucky taps his fingers again. His eyes narrow and years of shared experience tip off how close to disbelief he treads.

“Valkyries.” Steve is indeed blushing pink, unable to suppress a grin instead of spluttering. “Look, they’re the real deal. That’s why I think this can work out. Those girls know how to fight and if you get into trouble, they can keep you from having problems until you calm down.”

“Or until they truss me up like a pig.”

Bucky turns the screws even as he still tries to grapple with the unbelievable.

He’s so damn incorrigible, a hint of the older James showing through the cracks once in a while. More of that in the future would be welcome, Steve decides. Pity he can’t order good luck on command, but he can dream. “Don’t think I want to find that out firsthand. Anyways, think about it, will you? You're a vet and a hard worker, just the sort of thing they like. Erik’s happy to take you on if you think the role is a good fit.”

“And this?” Bucky flexes his metal fist.

“About that. Wanda can cover that up,” Steve says slowly. “Not any weird tech.” He already anticipates the question he knows has to be pushing at the forefront of Bucky’s thoughts, and the next five following it. “Magic. Make your arm look normal, and it stays the same in every way.”

Knocked back on his ass by that news, Bucky has neither words or means to articulate any kind of thought for a good long time. He can always count on good ol’ Steve Rogers to give him all the time needed to formulate his own opinion on matters.

Big hero, bringing an impossible hope back from no man’s land. He’s witnessed this time and time again in the past, but nothing keeps the surprise from being so sweet and potent as the first time.

“Sure. What the hell do I have to lose?” He shrugs. “Let’s see if this crazy plan of yours works.”

 

* * *

 

A week later Bucky Barnes, a la Jack Frost, finds himself in the office of possibly the largest man he's ever seen -- a great, golden-haired, bluff fellow with a booming laugh and looks that make women swoon.

After three panic attacks overcome by agonizing pain, he has since ceased to even remotely try to ruminate on whether or not Erik is, in fact, worthy of swooning over.

Larger than life, without a doubt. The boss' bright nature borders on flamboyant and clearly the crowds gathered every night adore the ambiance as much as they do him. He welcomes them all and shows no distinction between men or women, young or old, for his attentions. Occasionally he joins them at the bar to recite tall tales or might join in the singing on the stage, and surprisingly, he carries a tune well enough. Surprisingly enough, so do the other staff. Bucky's even caught himself singing along now and then. Patrons drink up the unusual assortment of liquors and the bartenders’ insistence they serve neither boring drinks or beers on tap. No one gives him a second look.

No one claims anything about Asgard or valkyries or otherworldly matters. Those who know do a different kind of business, and those who don’t are left blissfully unaware. Bucky fits right in, just another bloke dressed to the nines, forgettable as the next.

For the first time, he starts to feel confident again.  

Erik leaves Bucky to do basically whatever tasks need doing, whether patching up a wall or drying down the bar, hauling kegs into place or directing questions here and there. With some minimal instruction, he falls into the swing of things. Supplies are ample and the few times he speaks up in need of something special, it appears within a few hours, no questions asked. Along with the crisp suits and fresh new boots, he receives a thorough education in the sundown to sunup rhythms of a hot New York club. Much to his surprise, he adjusts easily into a lifestyle that keeps him out of the public eye while surrounded by people, comfortably numb. 

Nights come and go painlessly. The day he greets with a weary fatigue and collapses into bed, properly worn out to the point the long, restless stretches turn into shorter fractures of proper sleep by the sixth day. He starts to get reckless. He dares to plan about the next week, maybe getting his own food from a bodega somewhere in Brooklyn where immigrants are less likely to recognize him, and possibly repaint a wall in the apartment something other than a depressing, dull shade of cream. By now he knows he should never dare think about afternoons with Steve or Nat and putting some of his future funds towards a good couch.

He shows up and Kara sends him off to the office after his arrival, wearing a distracted smile, but that could mean anything. Asgardians aren't humans. They don't have to worry about the bills or the government showing up to haul them off in magnetized cuffs for some installation that doesn't actually exist. So he crushes out the embers of hope, swallows his pride, and goes to face his fate. Never let anyone say he lacks for courage, even if screwed up.

Seven days into things and Bucky is fairly sure this meeting means he’s getting the boot. Either the owner came to his senses or someone pointed out the obvious, and the inevitable falls.

After entering the expansive subterranean room decorated with a heavy masculine influence, all brass fittings and a large table serving as a desk, he faces down Erik with all the stalwart resolution for a man about to be overrun.

“Why the long face?” Erik tells terrible jokes. Humour of the Earthly variety must be a new thing for him. “‘Tis Friday, is it not?”

Bucky nods. “End of the week.” Delaying is hardly his favourite tactic.

“Aye, and here you are with your nose to the very grindstone,” his boss says. “I had hoped a few days might ease the knot between your shoulders, but making a good first impression, the new environment, the distractions.” He waves his huge hand, dismissing those notions.

What now? The soldier stands at parade rest, doing all he can to quiet the stirring whirlwind of his thoughts. “Yeah. I can lighten up, if you need.” If. _If_ there is an opportunity.

Doubt saturates the air as thick as a perfume slightly turned, too acidic for the richer base notes. Sorting through papers, Erik finds an envelope printed in the corner with an exclusive address, tiny precise font. He holds that out in offering.

“My termination papers?” mutters Bucky.

“What?” Erik blinks, throwing back the brilliant golden mane of his hair from his brow in a sweep that catches against his ear. “No!. That’s your pay cheque. Signe tells me the bank needs to make payment this way, this week, instead of the depositing money to your account. Entirely bothersome, so I added a bit to sweeten the inconvenience. I’ve had no cause for complaint. Kara thinks you do brilliantly at the bar, so we might try more of that next week.”

In the minutes that follow Bucky somehow finds himself standing in the back room looking at a numerical amount with too many zeroes, more than he ever earned with the army and certainly now. No one pays assassins or instruments of hidden agencies.

He owes Steve big. The kind of big that calls for a steak.

And maybe, just maybe, he thinks this could work out after all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why is he telling Thor -- no, his boss -- this? These are the secrets he holds to himself in the worst moments overnight when anxiety creeps up his back and takes a feverish hold of his brain. Metal fingers clench against the secure cradle of his palm. “When I touch my girl, everything locks up. It hurts. When I think about sex, I hurt. The doctors made us link pain to intimacy.” 
> 
> A fixed gaze at his boots refuses to rise. “When I came back I thought it was home free, you know? But when I -- when we kissed -- the agony came crawling up. Pain everywhere. I can’t touch or be held. Can’t get close.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thor is explicit about what he intends to do with Bucky, leaving few secrets about how he plans to unravel the psychological programming left behind by Zola. He's going to make Bucky focus on what he wants until he begs for it, then set him alight with need for release. As the passion is unleashed, the remaining Winter Soldier programming doesn't stand a chance. Hot sex ahead. 
> 
> Feedback is always warmly welcome. I get fuzzies from the comments, so leave your thoughts and recommendations. <3

Any given Tuesday at the club, the pace of business slows enough to free up the employees to care for other concerns. Late in the evening means the tide turns, sending out the usual rush of university students, businessmen, and upper middle class sorts with rarefied tastes in drink and entertainment. The establishment differs from its Greenwich Village brethren by holding to a higher calibre of service and patron than jazz bars or dingy indie clubs charging $15 cover.

An odd place to find the Winter Soldier, but when Steve promised he’d find a job suited for a recovering vet with a history of PTSD, he came through. And that said, he finds the unlikely workplace suits him, against all the odds.

Probably has something to do with the strictly Asgardian staff, one of whom glides past almost without a sound. Kara nods to him, stifling a grin. She handles a full cask of wine like it weighs absolutely nothing.

“Keep at it, you might end up becoming manager within a year,” she says in passing, nudging the door with her hip.

“Naw. Just glad to be lending a hand.” He shakes his head. Thinking about the future any more than a fortnight out still gives him the oddest sensation.

She winks and swivels, vanishing into the comfortably dim gloom of the brick hallway, her strawberry-blonde hair bouncing above her shoulders. Just the girl next door, and he knows she is more than his match if matters get rough on the floor.

He almost pities anyone causing trouble when the Winter Soldier is the least threatening, physically, of the staff.

Buck's in the back, cleaning and organizing one of the stock rooms, surpluses of strange liqueurs racked like a wine cellar, obscure herbs and resins in jars. He wears an illusion, a minor one in the shape of a normal arm, courtesy of a certain witch, so for once he's only in t-shirt and suit pants and half-apron at his waist, mopping the floor with something that smells faintly of lemongrass. Not working hard enough to break a sweat, he is efficient enough. He hums to himself as he works, something jaunty and martial and distinctly Russian.

“Erik” knows the contents of his cellars down to the last bottle and its placement, though they are hardly the most valuable contents. Crates and casks hide other treasures from the Nine Realms secreted away for a time. Some clients pay handsomely for temporary storage and the incomparable security. His employee doesn’t know the most obvious secret, the façade Erik uses to conceal his true identity as Thor Odinson of Asgard.

His thoughts on the business of revels, he descends the steps three at a time with the clatter of his finely made brogues soft on stone. Not wood, not here. There's an access point out into the old city sewers from a time when the island of Manhattan was nigh unoccupied and it might be his destination. Why is he dressed in a black sweater and jeans when his habit is always wearing a suit when at work? Up to no good, perhaps. In the dark, ill-lit place meant to store brews of a mad alchemist's making, the prince surveys all before him. That Russian song is a curiosity, for certain.

Bucky sets aside the mop when Erik appears, looks up with a kind of masked curiosity. Guess who's at least examined that access point. He left fresh oil on the hinges of the door against the day it will need to be opened in haste. Though he hasn't yet fled from trouble.

That pale gaze takes in the change of outfit, but if there's any courtesy he's learned, it's that of not asking questions. Especially now, quietly aware that his fellow employees keep a low profile on Midgard. He nods in greeting, hair pulled back but not knotted, heading for shoulder-blade length, these days.

Mopping to the music isn't so unusual in the club. Some of the staff can carry a tune and some of them are patrons to the future age of tastemakers. Erik is no different, golden-haired and bright-eyed. He hums the last bar of Bucky's tune. "The acoustics are decent down here." His hand runs along one of the rocky bits of stone, rubbing the dust into nothingness on a print that matches nothing in any database. SHIELD sees to that.

"Good evening, Bucky. Someone might think we're a den of long-haired louches at this rate." His own runs past the top of his scapula, a departure from the closer-cropped style.

"Evening, boss," Bucky says, mildly, cocking his head a little. His boss with long hair - it renders that severe beauty a hair more leonine. There's a little curling grin at that comment. "I've thought about getting it cut," he admits. "I really should. The problem it was originally intended to cover is gone now, after all." He's got rubber gloves on. No use having something strongly scented on your hands when you're mixing drinks, later. But he draws them off, carefully.

Erik examines his domain for but a moment and then returns to Bucky, finding things not wholly out of place in any way that beckons commentary. "Yes, you could cut it to match everyone else. Or you could be the master of your own style. I certainly won't judge." He hardly has right to, when half of Asgard prefers extravagant tastes. "What’s this problem to cover? Some ill-thought tattoo or ill-got piercing after a night on the town? People do such unlikely things when totally freed from their stifling conventions, and then regret their decisions thus."

Bucky laughs, soundlessly, eyes going to blue crescents as his shoulders shake. "Nah, I don't have any tattoos." The star on his arm is a manufacturer's mark, after all. "Or piercings. I had a wound on the back of my head that took off a big patch of skin and hair. Better now, though, and the hair is growing out long enough I wouldn't have to buzz my head like a new recruit to make it all match.

"No, I imagine you've already had enough with the augmentations to prove you are truly a rebel with a cause." Erik rests his shoulder against the wall, leaning off those truly splendid boots. Where's he going with polished, shined combat boots to go with his ensemble? Disappoint that poor man, the incognito prince hasn't given a good reason to guess at. "Better on the outside and more meaningfully mature. On the inside?"

Boots that get a dual flash of envy; both Winter and James are infantry, at heart. That comment makes him pull a little face, humor collapsing into soberness, the light dying out. "At this point, any kind of thing like that would seem just cosmetic, yeah," he admits. "And little alterations would just seem silly."

And Erik, mortal byname for Thor, the prince of Asgard, definitely constitutes infantry. He weighs up the response before even deigning to answer Bucky. "Fake it until you make it, they like to say. You can take whatever form you like, wear whatever you want. In New York, you can be a new man, no matter how that image is. Little alterations or major ones, they make no difference. They should be acceptable to both. Don't presume what is silly or not."

The smile's back again, if more subtle. "Yeah," he says, turning back to pick up a little jar of tuberose wax, dusting it with a rag. "That's one of the things I love about New York. That it's place where people come to transform themselves. From other countries, from the rest of the country. I've never been really anywhere in the US except when I was in the Army. And then it wasn't far west. I went down to Georgia for training, once, in the summer." Is he chattering at Erik? Easy for him to sometimes forget the bluff man isn’t an actual Asgardian, but just an army friend of Steve’s.

The thought leaves him comfortable enough to relax his guard -- or skating over conversational thin ice, with the bigger questions lurking beneath?

"Zeitgeist of the city," Erik agrees, nodding amiably. He takes it all in without moving much, his expression an unfaltering image of hospitality curbed by amusement. Just a few fractured shards, nothing entirely out of the ordinary. "I went down to Georgia for a concert, once, though nothing much to speak positively about. Much overhyped, I fear. The west has more to market itself with, depending on your proclivities. Mountains, space, and fresh air are coveted even as the people leave farms and forests behind for New York's lights."

He's not going to drop that line of inquiry, chatter or not. "You have been finding some kind of stability here. A fresh mask, a different look. How is that not starting anew, transforming yourself? Why only skin-deep?"

"I'm gonna see it, some day, the West," Buck asserts, setting down the jar, picking up one of rose. He stays angled so he can keep an eye on both his work and his employer. "Well, it is starting over," he admits, with a nod. "I mean, it's not just how I look. I look pretty much the same as I did, except for the hair. But ever since I came back, finding my feet is the hard part, you know? This has been a good place to work."

There's an air of earnest thought there, not merely parroting praise to stroke Erik's ego. "I'm a lot saner than I was," he admits, after a throat-closed beat of hesitation. "This is like normality."

Hard not to appreciate rose, the sweet scent of it permeating the air. It brings old memories to the fore, visions of Frigga in her garden. "Something to be said for starting over." He agrees on that front, and Erik -- less exactly human, now, when contemplating on his faraway home -- reaches for the mop to put it aside. "You can never fully hit a reset button to start recording again, as the after-echoes are always there. It's a second take, a third take." He hooks his thumb through his belt loop.

"You realize that's true for every breath you take, and every moment of your existence? You reshape yourself. One universe dies in an instant, reformed in the next heartbeat. Imagine the freedom you have. Your past holds you only with superficial shackles, 'Jack.'"

Jack. How Steve first introduced them and Bucky blurted out “Jack Frost” for the payroll. He still looks at his cheques funny, but no one can very well put a wanted, dead man’s name down. Well. Except “Erik,” who is no more real than “Olivia Ran” used by Kara, or half a dozen other monikers.

Whom Erik is, he’s never found out. Someone Steve trusts, meaning he is someone important.

Erik chuckles. "Like the hair. You let it grow longer. You dye it, cut it, shave it, you have the choice to make yourself how you will even if the barber did an atrocious job or you let it grow the way it wants. This is normality. This is the way the world was meant to be."

That name. His lips part, as if to argue. But then, he has slipped free, with help. Over the wall, under the wire, and out into no man's land. He nods at that, and then notes, with a certain faint irony, "It'd been a long time since I was in ranging distance of normality," he agrees. "You get used to being used to anything." He reaches for the mop with a child's reflex, as if to take it back, and then lets the metal hand fall. No need to pretend to busyness. Thor's not that kind of boss.

"That's part of life too. Unpredictable even though it follows given stages. The content changes even if the beats don't. You accept that the world will not work the way you might prefer," Erik says easily, "and you suddenly master the perverse joke that is being played on almost everyone." He isn’t looking around for his benighted brother, no way. Rather, he casts a blue-tinged look across Bucky's expression, as if he can suss out something in question. The mop could well be taken if he really wants it, but the soldier has to decide on that. "Normality. But you're not at it, not perfecting it right now. Or else you wouldn't be talking like that."

"No, I'm not," he admits, more softly. "Not yet," There're no literal goosebumps, but still that sense of hackles coming up, just a little. Sniffing the air to find what's on the wind. "But I can see it from where I am, which I couldn't before. And I can head towards it. This helps," A gesture of the alloy fingers takes in the bar, the blond god, their surroundings.

Arms cross over the breadth of his chest. Erik doesn't chuckle. It's a weird thing, perhaps, being under the weight of those blue eyes that witnessed so much of the Nine Realms. But they are warm, rather than coldly judgmental. "What do you need to make it happen? For as long as you're loaded down by past cares you are not achieving your potential and whatever you should be. Want to be."  
What does he need? Really need. That little line knits itself into being between his brows, and he actually worries at his lip. "I don't know. I've got more of the trappings, now. A job, an address. I need a clean record, but I honestly can't get it. I killed someone in public," he says, simply. "I can't undo the things that were done to me. I've got goals, but they're not normal, not really, other than not being a slave again. And freeing the other ones like me." He rubs at his temple with a cool silver thumb. He's his own headache pack.

"You are not alone in that. Why, the Avengers take the blame for all sorts of misfortunes they had nothing to do with. Things go well," Erik gamely points out, "and they never say a word of thanks. But the bridge needs construction or the Yankees didn't win, it's our fault." He taps his finger against Bucky’s defined bicep, heedless of his strength. "There will always be someone looking at your past to define whom you are now. Humans are singularly excellent at failing to look beyond their noses. They like to take a notion within their limited perception as proof of preordained fate, and judge all actions on that. You cannot change the past. You _can_ undo what was done."

His eyes narrow, pupils fading into a sheen of indigo radiance bracketed by stirring tendrils that flow beyond golden lashes. It's the sole reminder he is not human, his divine mantle hidden away poorly. "Some things for you -- aging, amputation, lost time -- would not be easy. But the fragments you think are so far apart, unable to fit together smoothly, can indeed come into a single self without weak points. They might even be a stronger unified whole than they were when you walked into that little military caper." Right. World War. Caper.

Easy to say for the prince of a foreign land, realm, whatever Asgard counts as. Try being mortal. The soldier wants to say the words and dares not, biting his tongue to prevent bitterness from finding the wrong target.

Now Bucky tenses to argue, that tightness coming into face and posture, almost combative. Then it goes again. "You could do that." It isn't a question. There's calm again, almost remote. "I don't know if I can. I have….There are others like me. Soldiers like me in Russia, controlled by the same sick minds that turned mind. Worse off. My.... my sons or my brothers. Even if you can walk in and just erase it all, make me a whole version of whatever I am now, I think it needs to stay, for now. They won't have you to help them. I have to be the one to do it. To be the map or the template." He doesn't ask why Thor would offer or what he gets in return. The go of thunder operates on such a cosmically different scale.  
Silent resignation has no place in the god’s shining, burning expression. Some of the humanity is slipping away, boiled off as the temperature rising around them proves to be the frog-in-a-pot exercise. "Healing isn't my art as a rule. My mother has ever been better. Even Kara would suit. Valkyries have a gift for it." He makes a distasteful pull, his fingers running along his jawline. Its classical balance would put the ancients to shame, running for chisel and brush for the moment to capture the sunlight in the middle of an autumn night. "For the most part, correcting a bad pattern by an illuminating lesson suits me. Learn by your mistakes. But in this case I'm willing to make a diversion to stop you from walking around in circles." His hands drop away and he steps off the wall, straightening himself from the easy lean. 

Bucky holds firm and fast, gone rigid as the taller man circles around him. Old habit, when on the parade ground under examination by a superior officer or later, measured up by the scientists seeking a flaw or something to tweak. The old shudder uncoils deep in his belly.

“You make it sound awfully easy,” he says. He isn’t sure what the prince is tiptoeing around, only that a misstep could break everything.

"Your men 'just like you' aren't quite in your predicament. If your handlers were uncreative enough as I expect, their linchpins are exactly the same as yours. Close enough for similar techniques to work." Erik steps nearer. Bucky might start backpedalling if not to be overshadowed by him. Darkness gutters even thicker, shadows confined to the edge of the cellar, the lights low in the cellar.. "Pull the pin and the facade falls.”

His heart cracks in his breast, filling his ears with the rushing hiss of blood. Bucky swallows. “Scientists in Wakanda tried. They unscrambled some of my brain. But not all of it. Some parts aren’t right. I can’t...”

Why is he telling Erik -- _no, his boss_ \-- this? These are the secrets he holds to himself in the worst moments overnight when anxiety creeps up his back and takes a feverish hold of his brain. Not even Natasha knows how much he dreads sleeping, facing the sharp edges that prove Shuri wrong.

Erik's patience must be better than Steve and Clint say, because he demands nothing, holding completely still.

Metal fingers clench against the secure cradle of his palm. “When I touch my girl, everything locks up. It hurts. The doctors made us link pain to intimacy.” A fixed gaze at his boots refuses to rise. “When I came back I thought it was home free, you know? But when I -- when we kissed -- the fear came crawling up. Pain everywhere. I can’t touch her. Can’t get close.”

“Any code can be subverted, any programming redesigned." Whatever thin veil of humanity conceals Thor vanishes in a moment when he clenches his fist and makes  a sharp gesture. Gone, the black clothes to meld into the night, replaced by a finely made tunic and pants, vambraces at his wrists. His voice hums with dark promises and dawntide melodies, nothing more than a whisper stirring the humble stones to murmur accolades.

In a flash it's there, the prince in full sublime self, at five feet away and closing. In his brilliant eyes lie whole universes, the glory of the Nine Realms shining in bright light. He makes movement hypnotizing artistry for all finding the god of thunder looming is undoubtedly disconcerting. One hand reaches out to cup Bucky's face, barring no attack to block him on it. "Flawed thing you are not. The corrections are so minute."

The legends say that serpents could hypnotize birds into stillness with their gaze. The firstborn prince of Asgard, as compelling as a storm, can do no less. He sees Bucky tremble and sway in that burgeoning light, the pupils pinning the mortal fast. But he doesn't flinch away or lower his eyes. The touch is enough to feel how the mortal's pulse is racing -- excitement, fear, something both or neither. No attempt to block at all, his hands are curled as his side.

Nothing makes Thor human in that compelling, breathless reconfiguration that assumes his true self, reshaped by proverbially straightening cuffs and opening the collar. He hasn't ever forgotten his origins, and neither has reality. The enchantments laid on him evaporate.

Leaning forward, the god says, "Maybe we can solve one problem with another. Midgard is limited in her methods where Asgard is not."  
He stares a little longer, the weight of his years and raw, overpowering charm brought to bear. One day he will be a king. Echoes of it whisper through him now, some lessons learned at Odin’s knee brought to bear.

It’s almost overwhelming. The man struggles for breath right about then.

Thor presses his thumb onto Bucky’s pulse point, under the jaw right where the steady beat sounds out the passing seconds of the soldier's life.He leans forward, his brow all but brushed upon Bucky's.

"Your conditioning shows up like bubbles in a dark sea. Trace them back to the source..." His finger slides slowly down from the pressure point to throat, collarbone, further. "Then acknowledge these are not your thoughts. They are independent of your mind. Nasty part of the process to just tear out the trigger, but it's far easier to redirect it. Even shaped by torture and mild sedation or hypnosis, focus on your positive trigger."

It's like watching rats scramble when the lights snap on and find no place at all to hide in. A tidal rush scrambling around the walls, whorling chaos. James is waiting, almost a blank slate. Winter, that spectre, is in utter terror, cold precision reduced to a blind panic before the light. Lewis once compared the entrance of God to a willing heart like asking an architect to repair a cottage, only to find he's rebuilt it into a palace for his own tastes. Surely Thor can do no less, warrior to warrior.

The Asgardian breathes Bucky's breath, feels the steady heat under a tidy white shirt. "Or just a good strike at the right spot and blow the doors open. They made you no monster as dark as you think, James Buchanan Barnes. I see your heart as the All-Father sees it. Or do you doubt you are worthy?"

He can certainly see the fault lines the conditioning laid down, the cracks in the walls, the deformation of thought and response and reflex. Pleasure denied, those feelings are turned into mere surcease from pain and cold, conditioning intended to render a man as blindly responsive as a brute beast. His real name on Thor's lips makes him flinch, but he's still not fighting to get away.

"N… nn.. _no_ ," he says, and the working of his throat moves under Thor's fingers. "W….why?"

Lewis knew far more than he'll ever be credited for by either side of the Great War. In his apologist writings, the critical insight to the nature of mankind's foibles and flaws is penned. Thor probably hasn’t read them but he understands the sentiment, at least in this.

He tips Bucky's head up slightly as though to find the imperfect secreted among the mundane. Is it not tender how he pushes the trembling figure back to find support of the wall, rather than suspended in a moment of time? He slides the knife in, as it were, by whispering, "Because you must believe." It's as simple as that. Belief is everything. "Faith is going to hold you together. You know who I am. Say my name." No command, only the weight of expectation hovers there. He takes another step inwards.

What other choice remains? Bucky goes back against the bare spot on the wall, between the racks of shelves, brick cool against his back, with only that one layer of cotton between -- in step with Thor, smooth as a dance. But once he reaches it, it's what's holding him up, leg muscles trembling like a new colt's.

James licks his lips and says, in a voice gone airless, "Thor. You're Thor." It's the name he has, a few inadequate syllables. "You're a god."

Thor nods, wordless. Frigga is superior in every way to healing wounds, but he possesses a different kind of wisdom and sensitivity for the fault lines inflicted by great cruelty.

He cups Bucky's face as though something hopelessly precious, fragile as a newborn bird, molded from the stuff of creation into a fresh form. "The curse is removing your _volition_ , your wants wiped off the board. So that is where we begin. I’ll teach you to capture your want, and pull your desire to yourself. Armour. I will make you want. Again and again. Until you are want's captive and desire's master, and those who impose on you anything less will perish in the immolation of your established need. But first. First, you have to _want_ for something, for someone. You must experience want so sincerely you think it will kill you, and after it has slain you, you still crave it with every particle of your being. Death isn't an end but a transformation, and that desire you hold isn't going to change from gold to lead."

Bucky snakes an arm around Thor's neck, weakly, holding himself up - more like a soldier helping his comrades carry him off the field than any gesture of affection. His heartbeat is a runaway gallop behind the cage of his ribs, and there's the sharpness of fear sweat on the air now, amidst all the more refined scents. No verbal agreement, but there's assent in the way he rests his brow against Thor's. The first want is not to fight. To surrender, for once, even as the fractured shadow the Soviets imposed looks for somewhere to flee to.

"Thor Odinson." Every note is a hammer-blow, the individual notes of a soaring crescendo meant to captivate the symphony's audience. "Erik is for social propriety. You can call me Thor."

The purr of his voice is a thunderstorm charged by plasma, the haunted nocturne rashly sharing forbidden lore. "As much a god as you are a soldier." As if they are _just_ that.

"Thor," Bucky all but chokes on it. “I don’t know what to do.”

The golden-haired prince pulls back only so far as to keep his wild gaze locked to James' face. There will be no escape by sight, sound, touch; all the senses may be denied and he'll find a way to pry back those bars keeping Bucky Barnes contained in a prison of HYDRA’s making. Fear has a scent, and gives him direction on where to strike precisely for a positive reaction.

"See it. Feel it. That thing you need more than breath, more than life. That," he rumbles, "is the reason to live To push through the resistance, however hard. Expect to plead and beg for that want as it lingers just out of reach until you convince yourself to break free those petty bonds to take it." His voice is steady, a path to follow. There is so little shadow to it, and the burning revelation he embodies hunts down the soldier. "And when we start testing those bonds, we will see and know how deep your desire goes. Time to begin. Give me the first word. Then focus. Your body isn't the thing to betray you, neither is your mind. It is _them_ \-- the spectres of your fear, the men or the pain they left behind. Deny them. As I deny you what you want this time."

There's a flash of memory - the parish priest urging his parishioners to abjure the Devil's works and pagan acts. A snatch of dialogue echoes in Bucky’s mind of an army chaplain reciting Scripture how as the divebombers screamed overhead. The man would have shamed himself facing a god of a heathen faith in a bar or on a battlefield.

He tries not to smile. Thor almost grins, feeling him relax a little.

Life is unfathomably strange. Something in that gives him comfort. Just as the steady voice promises freedom. A breath without those mental shackles on him. For a wonder, there's no real horror at the reality of Asgard and gods and Realms, all those stories that Steve can’t quite bring himself to explain. A divine power that Vikings once worshipped holds him. Whatever faith he may've professed in childhood, whatever church attended, he makes no attempt to detach or drive Thor away. Faith didn't defend him from those decades in captivity. Faith was no bulwark against the shattering of mind and will.

Unsurprising, perhaps, for elbowing past love and desire and freedom is revenge, insistent, a burning coal. "I want to destroy them," It's a thought and something spoken aloud… Images of utter destruction. His mind and heart may want his brothers' freedom, the unburdened pursuit of Nat, Steve's companionship. But the first gut instinct is wanting to raze the chambers he was tortured in.

How empowering, to hear his name on the tongue of another. Is there not a certain bubbly elixir that runs through the proverbial bloodstream at recognition for who he is instead of pretending to be human? Good for business to keep a low profile, but hard on the Asgardian’s soul.

Thor gives a cellar a solid regard. In that instant, the vast weight of his attention released from Bucky's being. Breathe. Breathe deep. It will not be a boon companion tonight again. "A fine choice," he agrees, acknowledging the declaration with none of the paternalistic intent or the fire of a preacher at the pulpit. He traces a look along the injured amputation, the metal construct an effort to recreate where man has not mastered its biological arts. It's almost tender how he caresses the cap of the shoulder and feels where the sleeve turns cool in metallic slats to the touch.

That touch should send a responsive shudder through the younger man, but he can barely summon the ability to draw in air. His dry throat clenches around a lump the size of Sisyphus’ great stone. Bucky dares not to look away to watch the touch of perfect fingers over a shoulder transformed into scar ridges and ill-knit flesh. He wrenches his gaze away to the wall, a safe space for turbulent thoughts.

"A caution," Thor murmurs. "Destruction comes easy. Creation is difficult, arduous, and demanding. Anyone can torch a building." Thor’s fingers curl lightly to his palm, throwing off an electrical scintilla no brighter than candle flame. "Slay a man, that's weak destruction. Now holding the power to completely undo all his works as you build yourself is a key to your freedom. I will not teach you how to destroy them. You already know how to do that." And that record is long, pristinely wrought with so many headstones and bullets littered across the face of Europe.

He considers, his flashing eyes narrowed. "I will show you the path to master yourself. And with that you will walk fearless through the perilous places where they reforged you, and show them you were stronger, better, all along. After you rip out the roots of their poisoned system, then what? The future awaits."

It’s more than Bucky could have hoped for. Moments of suspended silence enfold him as he processes the promise and starts to shake in earnest.

Thor tips his head, golden hair bright as a flame running down his shoulders. His lips touch Bucky's brow, a kiss of a blessing, a benediction of a god upon a tool of uttermost ruin. "But for that, you must undermine the layers they've swaddled you in. Rend those first to cobwebs and dust so we can begin. For that, this room and place will not do. I will see you through this, with an eye to time." Always an enemy, time, of mortality. "Do you consent to it? If so, leave behind the tools and let's go upstairs. We need all night, to be generous."

A brow that's already cold with chill sweat tastes of salt beneath those lips. Bucky still shakes, though the chamber is hardly cold. But... this is something else. Not an offer just to knock down the walls of the conditioning, but to undo them utterly...

But Thor's asking his consent. This is beyond the event horizon of anything like sanity -- he may keep company with aliens, heroes, beings from other worlds entirely, but they've all been inhabitants of stories. The actual god is running a club in which he works. This is an offer on another plane entirely. He's silent for a little, as brows knit.

But then they smoothe again, and he says, quietly, "I do." It has the air of an oath, and what an odd place to make it.

Thor straightens in all his leonine, golden glory. He rolls his shoulders and shifts his head slightly, awaiting that wholesome crack as tension gives way. Superlative skill allows him to shatter defenses with a single blow of Mjolnir. His talent with men is a little further behind though not by much. Behold that the Winter Soldier in all his shadowed torments, puppet to empires and flawed tool in the armory, is subject to the same passing caress as he dissembles the man through considered patience. All men eventually break, some more than others. Their flaws stand out cleanly to a psychological engineer as himself. Strike true and...

And what? Spread the dust, mix it anew into a fresh form, pour a new cast? Retain the old and it comes with its own weaknesses, after all, but there's a risk worth taking. After all, if it breaks -- as it breaks -- won't he be primed to repair it to be superior?

"Well. We best be on our way," he adds to break a silence that is so terribly short.

The door will be pushed open, a brighter hallway shown.

He follows mutely, having left the cleaning supplies behind. Face bland as a mask, the eyes are alive, even bright, in a way they never are when it's Winter driving.

They walk together out of the depths of the club, seeking the staircases and corridors for an Asgardian sanctum in the heart of the Big Apple. Rooms plush with various comforts open, but Thor ignores those. They're headed for a rather massive chamber with sheet glass overlooking the city, a fireplace, decor in polished wood and brass. It might even feel vaguely like a posh gentleman's library or an ancient temple and nothing in between. Sanctuary for Bucky and the ghost of his nightmarish past.

The view of the city is comforting, enough so to wrench his gaze away from even Thor. Home is home, the spires familiar from any angle, and he looks out at the view for a long, long moment, before glancing back inquiringly to Thor. Mute again -- the Winter Soldier's used to being told, not asking the questions that aren't strictly necessary.

The building commands a fine look over Manhattan with a measure of anonymity. Neither the Avengers Tower or some refuge buried deep underground, it serves its purpose to enshroud the world in a gleam of life, the _electricity_ of the civic body, the howls of the vox populi audible below.

Thor saunters through the room without care for the fact no human could walk with such orchestrated ease, and ownership. He unclasps the neckline of his tunic and hauls the garment over his head in a sinuous move, flinging it over an armrest with casual ease. The shirt beneath is peculiarly singular, a blue tee marked with a silver lightning hammer, the one modern nod.

"Sit, then. There will be no use for alcohol. I require you completely in control of your wits." He inclines his head to any of the arranged furniture; a high-backed chair, a lounge, an ottoman in leather rather than bonded garbage or strange patterns so loved nowadays. Just no.

The knock on the door follows a minute later. Kara, the strawberry-blonde valkyrie usually manning the bar, waits there in her customary black on black attire; slim jeans, button-down shirt, cropped coat. Could be mixing drinks or kicking in someone's ribs, one way or the other. She toys with the silvery necklace around her throat, one of three, each holding a slightly different pendant. The only hint she's not human -- never was, never is -- lies on the incandescent gleam shown in those deep, wide eyes of hers, grey-blue as a fine pool or mountaintop.  
"Come in, Kara." The Asgardian nods. "James, you need only tell her begone if you are uncomfortable. But hear my proposition, if you would. None other in our company is so fine a physician as Kara. Not on Midgard, anyways. She has eye for wounded souls and a fine talent for healing."

The t-shirt makes Bucky smile, despite himself. He obediently sits on the lounge, rather cross-wise. "All right," he says, resting his hands in his lap, like a docile student. Turned to face the god of thunder, his expression goes bland and open.

Certain communication requires few verbal cues. Familiarity aids. But the heat rising from the body, pattering heartbeats skimming erratic and the anticipation informs Kara in other ways. Bucky's solitude is a feast to be savoured, not devoured by cramming as much as she can into her mouth in a go. The lightly freckled bartender gives a reserved smile to both the men, gauging what she can. She runs both hands through her bobbed hair, tucking it back behind her ears. "It's not really a fair assessment. Healing comes in so many ways.”

She smiles at him, her eyes softening. “I help people deal with the unbearable sort of existential turmoil they face. A way to cope with the scope of life's challenges and demands," she replies, raising her shoulder. "You're like a bubbling pot."

Thor leans back against the wall. The remaining light of a dying day barely peppers the sky and outlines him in a silhouette shining faintly gold. His aura bends the light inwards, jealously cuddled to him. "Giving you until dawn should be sufficient. After Kara's work and mine, you're to undertake no strenuous activity afterwards. My word is absolute on this. Though you can be forgiven for wanting to take on the world afterwards." The shackles are still there if open, after all, and someone dispensing of the negative weight might assume positive buoyancy after how long? Anything could happen.

The mortal they address holds perfectly still while in their midst, a predator assessing the greater hunters slinking out of the dark. No matter how innocent and awestriking their appearance, a shred of survival instinct overrules the higher logical mind. He takes no chances, other than to give a tight nod.

Kara circles around the lounge and sighs, the appreciation hardly hidden. "You're going to be such a treat. Thank you." It may be odd for a valkyrie to thank a mortal, but she does sincerely, and head for the drawer. Pulling it open releases a wisp of incense and the distinct impression of water where none exists. A case plucked from the improbable depths is similarly nacreous, as though polished in pearl and cut willow, another wet wood. She gently sets the case aside.

"Destruction. That was your first request. Destroying them," Thor says, tasting the words as Kara sets out a variety of implements on the low tabletop. Most obvious, a small chalcedony glass, probably intended for wine or liquor. Hey, Bucky might require such libations after facing down his past. "Your trigger cannot be founded on the thing you will destroy. Once removed, then what?" He pulls up a seat and drops down onto it. His elbows plant atop his thighs, fingers steepling. "The first lesson is the hardest. Envisioning your trigger. The life you would have. The woman you want. The sight of your firstborn in your arms, punching your father in the face, a degree, the starry shield. You get the point." The crown, the sceptre, the blood. Name it, it is the point. "Learn to visualise in immaculate detail what you want, and you take the fangs from the serpent they placed in you. Focus upon the thing through all hardship until it is all you've got left, and you strip the venom. It sounds so utterly simple, but there you have it. Kara's task will be focusing you and distracting you. Mine will be keeping you from having what you want until you damn well claim it."

Normalcy in the strange has a vaguely freeing effect. Bucky looks over at Kara. "Ah, can I ask you what you are?" A glance between them, dubious. "Why is that a treat?" But then he's nodding at Thor again, softly. Then he considers, "The life I would have..." Apparently that's a hard thing to see. Life with Natasha? Living with Steve for good...

"I am a damn fine bartender," Kara answers, a crooked smile in profile for him as she looks over her shoulder at Bucky. Her fingers trail along the corners of the case. "Your shift manager. In this incarnation, healing, fertility, and the waters of the Earth fall under my purview. Valkyrie, as some of the classifications call me, goddess. One of the powers. I did not arise with his kind. I was born on Vanaheim, actually," she nods to Thor. "If anyone holds my allegiance, it’s his mother, Frigga. But here is where I stay because I wish to."

Her smile grows slightly softer. Her movements have something of a dance to them, confined by passing through the open space and sitting next to Bucky on the lounge. "It's a treat to be shown respect and a place to practice skills that most never appreciate. Not here. For all the talk of being open-minded, most men -- and the women -- in this society of yours truly aren't. Haven't you seen it? If you have no degree from an accredited medical school in an English-speaking country, you know nothing despite I can tell them how their foolish efforts to curb a disease with nonsensical treatments do more harm than good." Old argument there. She nudges the soldier with her elbow, leaning into him with a friendly ease shown to the rest of the staff.

That nudge sways Bucky from side to side, and he flows as he absorbs the motion. His chocolate hair brushes over his shoulders and he gazes back at her with a wide-eyed wonder impossible to mask. A goddess or a delusional case. Somehow the former feels more plausible than the later. "I should be surprised," he notes, in that gravelly voice. "But with the kind of company I've been keeping lately, not so much." He smiles back at her, and for once it's unclouded. That glimpse of Thor makes him blink, again, almost dreamy.

Thor steeples his finger. "The greatest power comes from being what you are. Affirming yourself through willful decisions to be that. You let Kara be herself, and she is stronger for it. By choosing yourself, you weaken the hold of some impacts on you. Again, simple principle but difficult in practice." For an instant, lightning crackles through the air, each fork etched in a photon of light braided by another until resolving for the human eye. A blink-and-miss-it occasion, the folded span of those pristine, marble-on-diamond halo around the seated prince. "Kara, the trigger for pain is sex or contact.”

She wrinkles her nose at the reference, eyes sharpened to flinty storm clouds. Her generous mouth tugs down into a tight frown.

The shame of it should mortify him. His issues laid out in such blunt terms between the Asgardians -- by the _crown prince_ , the _Avenger_ \-- are horrifying spoken aloud, and the old clots of shame shake free from the partly healed wound deep within. A man who can’t even bear a hug or an amorous thought without shaking in wrenching agony is pitiful.

Kara glances his way, sharp to the change of mood. “Stop that. This _isn’t_ your fault. Whomever inflicted that trauma on you holds responsibility, not you.” 

Thor presses on. “The antidote, if you had to guess. You know what would be?" His lapis gaze shifts back to Bucky.

Kara almost shivers in anticipation, and how not when it lies so strongly in her province. “Yes. You’re asking a lot, you know.” When the prince nods, she closes her eyes. “Then we should collect the rest of what we need. You’re sure about letting us help? It won’t be easy.”

Can he walk away? Maybe. To what, an empty bed and the certainty his own touch feels like thorns driven into the flesh and the very passive act of imagining his girl wearing nothing sending fire to scorch away any good feeling?

The very thought has him starting to shake, and a pair of warm hands engulf his biceps, pushing him upright. Thor is there on one knee, steadying Bucky against the urge to curl in the fetal position to resist the agony erupting out of memory. If he breathes too deep, is that the scent of ozone and hot metal, the sound of screams and his own sweat?

“ _James_.” Too hard to reach him by name alone.

A cool cloth presses to his brow, but that’s too soft to have any effect. He jerks away from the gentle touch and they seem to understand at once, a dawning awareness along a shared link. He bites his lower lip hard enough to nearly bleed, striving for the antidote to the pain.

Kara carelessly slaps him across the face, her open palm directed for the line of his jaw. Even stifling her strength, the force knocks his head back and would clear toss him over but for Thor gripping him fast.

In a blur, the twinned agonies cancel one another out and give him enough breathing room. Not the ice-cold clarity brought on by the Winter Soldier, but a close enough vestige he can find some means to restart his thought processes.

He croaks out, “I can’t live like this.”

Regret stains the valkyrie’s girl-next-door face, apology written large in her mouthed apology.  

Thor releases him in a moment, and he waits to ensure Bucky won’t fall over. "Focus. Ten minutes." The sand timer is plunked down on the table among the other objects. “Then we begin destroying this most unforgivable torture you are forced to endure.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor, aided by a valkyrie, sets about overloading Bucky with pleasure, in preparation to fuck him every which way. Bucky begs to be fucked, and what he wants, he gets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Asgardian prince assesses with the calculations of a man who has and does and will rule a realm. "If it were up to me, you'd be fucking her until you're too tired to stand." His mouth hooks into a vaguely higher shape, but those eyes are devilishly deep and unfathomably warm. "Do you want this, James? If I take you apart bit by bit, with a lovely vision to put you back together, do you say yea or nay?"
> 
> Bucky rolls on to his side, blinking at them with the vague, exhausted surprise of a shipwrecked sailor confronted with rescuers waiting for him on the strand. "Yeah," he agrees, voice hoarse, eyes heavy-lidded. "Please," he tacks on. Manners, manners. The line of his mouth firms, for a moment. Considering, inasmuch as he can give anything serious thought with his body aching and his brain buzzing like a skep of bees. Then he nods, sits up carefully, and holds out his hands to them, palm up.
> 
> He wants this -- Thor -- whatever it means and whatever challenge it brings.

Ten minutes spill out through the neck of the hourglass and Bucky barely notices. He can’t afford the distraction while anticipation leaves his skin prickling to the slightest hint of a breeze and heat flushing his cheeks, an achy prickle that cannot be banished by swallowing around the boulder lodged in his throat.

He received a divine command to concentrate on what he wants more than anything else in the world, as the prelude into breaking the warped reflection of a human that Zola and his Soviet puppeteers made of him. Somehow, by the dawn, Thor and his valkyrie shield-maiden intend to untangle eighty years of faulty programming to give him a running chance at a normal life. One that means he can bend Nat over the bed and raise her to throaty cries without buckling to the savage burning knife twisted in his guts.

It even hurts to consider now. He gulps and struggles to resettle his thoughts back into an even path, away from the greying vision and fantasies that contort his spine, forcing him to wrap around the shuddering discomfort. Breaking the aversion through drink or exposure hasn’t helped. Now he’s got an Asgardian prince offering him the world and his smiling coworker, supposedly one of those women who escort souls of slain warriors to the afterlife, promising to help.

Even thinking of Steve blessing this predicament sends a surge of lust and shame into the abyss, pain a chaser hot and bright. Sweat beads on his temples and he stares at the array of objects left on the table next to a willow-lined coffer, half the objects lacking actual names. Once James was the hot stuff on the streets of Paris, seasoned in the experiences other men craved and blushed about when writing letters home -- trying to forget what they learned overseas, especially those with sweethearts.

 _Want_. _Focus on_ _want_. Thor’s commandment rings in his skull.

All those options on offer: what does he actually want that isn't a negative? Surcease from Soviet ownership and torture, freedom from being hunted. Bucky's gaze flickers a little, touching patches of memory. That face of puzzlement and one corner of his lip pulls down, ruefully. The life he wants, cut off at the knees. You have to admit the possibility of a goal to reach for it. No children. Marriage? To whom? How would that work? Carry the shield -- please, god, no. That particular burden is fitted only for Steve's hand. He's almost empty, with that disturbing vagueness. Then his expression hardens again.

Ten minutes to tick down for him to decide. Ten minutes to be split in two separate directions.

The door clicks open behind him, footsteps and the swish of fabric announcing the return of the Asgardian duo. He continues to ruminate over the options, not looking up until a minute after the last grains of sand land on the heap. They wait on him, patience an apparently endless commodity. Something Bucky might be jealous of, were this exercise not calling on every last ounce of energy he has, and they haven’t even begun.

Ahead is Thor, seated casually in front of him. Leaning forward, the god might casually be contemplating business deals or destroying nations. He blinks and he breathes, and his unwavering indigo eyes never peel away from Bucky. He reads in the vision all he needs, perhaps, or he is a vacant presence of immense gravity pondering what colour to paint the bedroom.

The other pole of gravity is Kara. She smells faintly of woodsy forests, damp in the morning mist, and the cleanliness of a good shower. In her smooth hair falls the soft brush of ferns on the skin as she sits next to him on the padded chaise, and her weight rests against Bucky's arm -- the flesh one -- as he meditates. Or tries. A mutual exchange of warmth and heat that only comes through two beings beside one another gives a companionable dip into a warm pool, and she exudes a subtle sunlight nearly that wraps around a person in a narcotic haze. It's not the profound danger of opium poppies so much as basking in the daytime at a window. Time is her ally.

He ends up with her tipped into the curve of his shoulder, her head resting against his collarbone. He freezes up, drawing shallow, cautious breaths at the same time. It ought to feel nice, but he knows better by now. Proximity is dangerous, especially with redheads as a definite weakness. Or certain blonds.

Smaller but in no way weak, she patiently melts into him until he adapts himself to accommodate her or falls off the chaise. The leather absorbs their mutual heat, too, and their weight. Eventually, she reaches for his hand, capturing it with her own, stroking the back of his knuckles with her thumb.

The twinned powers work in terrible tandem, one reading for terror and the mental buck; the other for all the tells warning her where the mental pain and physical turmoil lie. She is alert for whether he quails from the brushed tenderness of her fingers or stirs to the conditioning with her cheek rubbing his jaw. It's all a calculated dance.

Not quailing, not yet. But holding himself still, he braces and waits for the pain, letting himself relax fraction by nervous fraction. Affection physically expressed by someone else is okay, even that hand-holding gesture. Steve hugs him, after all. But lust brings out the spontaneous rejection of magnets, shoved away.

Bucky closes his eyes, patiently. He's used to holding himself in that mental quiet, hovering in the emptiness of a clean cell, away from the pain of the body, of bewilderment and confusion. Just breathing, attending, but not reacting.

"Hold the vision fixed in your mind's eye. Breathe it. Live it while she's touching you," Thor's voice is the lure to follow through darkening zones of the sea. He can easily hypnotize animals and most people through his oratory, just a gift of that warm voice and dashing bombast, formulating his cadences and meter just so. "Start adding detail. It's not enough to see, James. Think about it. If you're tasting revenge, see their expressions. Hear the defeated look when they see you. If it's normality, drink the milk. Experience the cold on your tongue, the liquid sliding down your throat. It is your reality, after all, you're building it. This is your mental fortress, your palace, and the gun you're going to slay their work with, after all. Make it good."

These sentences are said over a course of many minutes, of course, not linked heavily together. Yoga gurus could learn a thing or two from his measured aspect, calm and thrilling at the same time. Maybe Thor embodies the excitement and Bucky dread, kissing cousins divided by a strawberry blonde lightly rubbing her nose against his cheek.

That, and her hand remains on his, easily crushed if he seizes down too much. But then aren't goddesses made of sterner stuff, especially the earthbound? If he bleeds, he's going to bleed out slowly, through the death of a thousand nuzzles and her arm slipping around him for a hug where pain walks. He leans a little more into her, giving up second by second. It helps that Kara is so acutely aware of discomfort, and reads the difference between shaky desire. Anticipation that makes him stiffen is to be remedied another way.

She rubs his back, tugging on his shirt this way and that. "This will have to go," she murmurs in Bucky's ear, his hair dusting against the slope of her freckled nose. Private mirth hides there, gentle as the dawn. "I wouldn't want to stain it with oil. You'll keep your focus better relaxed. Can I ask you the favour of taking it off? Sit or lie down, whichever you prefer." No masseuse is ever so gentle as that, but it's the whole exercise.

He blushes at that, all unthinking. Trying to focus, though the want is slipping around into another form. Less that raw destruction, for all that it was the knee-jerk first answer. The image he's holding is of his brothers, those soldiers still trapped in Russia -- no longer pale and blank, but free and comfortable. Trying to hold it, the act becomes a catalog of images. There's a possibility he can make concrete, showing them what he loves about New York. Making at least some of them the family he's lost.

There's the first flicker of distress at that request, but he peels his t-shirt off without argument, sets it aside. It's clear that the illusion he's wearing doesn't really conceal things from them, but then, they're gods in their own right. He stays sitting up, not rigidly so.

Get too familiar with the absence of comfort or freedom, and its return feels like the lash of a thorny cane. When Bucky waves, those gravitational forces pull on him. The god lays a finger on his knee and meets his pale, wounded eyes with the unshaken bravery of someone reading deep into the soul. Any flinch is enough to slow Kara, but not stop her from her task. The back of her knuckles stroked against his jaw or rubbing his shoulder divert at least some of the naturally-released endorphins meant to handle the dark reactions he's been taught. But taught reactions are far, far different from the impulses of the medulla oblongata arrayed over fifty thousand years of cumulative evolution. Soviet science may be good, but it's not that good. Completely flatlining the impulses of the body is almost impossible.

And therein lies the rub: they're assaulting him from within, turning his subconscious mind and natural instinctive reactions to quislings to their cause. Kara's tender ministrations and Thor's nudges are meant to undermine the logical brain. Show it how little say it has, when the chips are down. Even if those chips involve a bottle of warmed oil brought to skin temperature and Kara cheerfully demonstrating a killer ability to give a shoulder rub.

He’s trying not to gasp, teeth gritting together. When was the last time he received that kind of attention, masculine or feminine? Certainly not under the care of his Soviet handlers, who treated him impersonally and punished him for every imagined and real provocation, and not the Wakandans safeguarding their plucky genius, little more than a teenager, who kept a certain wary distance. Only Steve and Nat brave this kind of connection, and the lightning shocks that are Russia’s parting gift hold them at bay every time.

"Breathe. See the image, hold onto it. When it hurts, push yourself further into every aspect. You are making a room you can retreat into," Thor says. The air of command lingers on his voice, enough to wrench Bucky’s attention out of that grey void between pain and tingling reaction.

Kara's thumbs skim along the top of Bucky's shoulder and then pushes down, triggering the nerve endings buried all along the track. A good massage hurts as it loosens the muscles. But so too can it induce dizzying lassitude when done right. Ask anyone with a thumb pressed to the sacroiliac nerve, or its cousins. The buttery indolence can drop a man in his tracks. Her palms skim and work freely, and if she throws him about a bit to loosen him up to putty, it's only fair. The faintly earthy scent of the oil has its origins in the woods, too, calming cedar and warming sandalwood in there. Breathe that in, lose oneself to the resins, another assault beyond the tactile. She isn't afraid of her shirt getting stained, but then why? Attacking knots with a well-placed thumb or radiating spirals is all part of a long process indeed.

They said dawn, they meant it.

This is ten thousand kinds of weird, and some essential part of Bucky's mind has gone on strike. Sloping off to sit at the sidelines with its arms crossed, refusing to comprehend, leaving the various confused fractions to argue amongst themselves. The part of him starved for that particular flavor of physical affection has him trying to relax under Kara's hands. A pleasant distraction, but he's used to focusing will past all sorts of discomfort. He can resist the initial blandishments of scent and touch, clamping down on the images of those purblind captives in Siberia.

Thor watches the whole process, a sentry of sorts. Until he damn well knifes Bucky under the ribs, as it were, a crackling aura of pent-up static electricity sweeping around to embrace the valkyrie and their mark. Just the tips of those plasma-etched tendrils caress the skin, down the front, a masterstroke going from Bucky’s neck to the waistband of his pants with an artist's care. That's the tactile shock -- barely registered as a sting, only heat and a prickle -- meant to compensate for Kara pressed to his back, oiled palms to his chest, pulling him back to the safety of her own embrace. A heartbeat, solid, strong. "When it hurts, surrender to yourself," she whispers in his ear and bites the lobe with intent.

Oh, his resolve's eroding.

Then the conditioning kicks in like a disapproving hall monitor. Kara's efforts are undone in moments, and those electrified waves playing over his skin are a whole extra source of confusion. Incipient pleasure transmutes into the kind of nerve pain that makes muscles twitch, and he spasms in her embrace just as she bites down. There's a grunt of displeased surprise, but he goes still rather than trying to fight free -- surrendering indeed. Surrender is one of those unpleasant but necessary skills, gifts from his masters. It hurts less if you learn to keep from fighting.

Thor holds back, letting the valkyrie proceed with a deeper innate empathy as her lodestone.

The two powers work to keep Bucky constantly on a shifting footing. They do this unfairly, employing changeable sensations that confuse the system with all the biological ease of someone plugging in different vacuum tubes for effect. Does this touch cause him to overheat, does that chill evoke a reaction? Fear or joy? Switch and search, the discovery of the new is something they share in common. If pain dances alongside as a furtive coquette, Kara is there to change course and charge her path with those light and firm touches in opposition to make Bucky feel. It's all about feeling, smothering thought until it cracks under the weight of the man's intention to act, have, feel. Be.

Conditioning slaps along the way and she carelessly brushes her hands down his chest, leaving trails of oil. Her fingers skim along hardening muscles and pull, tugging at the nerve receptors to confuse them. Her nails tease through the coating and counteract the static aura sweeping in visible indigo arcs over the ribs, each wave counting dip by dip. She holds where she is, adapting to the new plateau, edging back. The next push isn't fair to be sweet, especially when he is subjected to the low laugh in his ear, her lips brushing the lobe. "Keep focus. You can have it. Hold it."

The god and the valkyrie feel control slip from Bucky, conscious will and concentration lapped over with sensation, sandcastles being washed away by the tide. "Stop," he says, and his voice cracks. How long has it been since he made that plea with any real expectation of being answered? Too long.

"Stop, please." He's trembling, his pulse visible in the hollow of his throat. "I couldn't..." Embarrassment conjures up that flush. So much for his training. But then, the Russians never did much of a job on training him to resist an onslaught of pleasure, of bodily confusion. Physical desire there's some success on abrading away, but this is sneaking in by the edges.

"Freedom," murmurs the god from that seat built to endure his impressive proportions, Asgardian make like everything else in the higher levels of the club. It's built to withstand worse than whatever can be found in the likes of an average man flexing his weight. "Go back. Find your trigger again, James. Hold onto it as if there is no tomorrow for you. Follow me back." He does not move so much as turn those burning, lambent summer-sky eyes upon the tormented man. Lightning motes vanish; there's no sight any longer of his divine mantle anywhere, the tangible elements gone and merely remembered in the physical touch of skin dreaming of such things.

Might Bucky waken in a cool sweat to wonder what it felt to be brushed by the dreams of the storm? He shudders in shame and wonder, licking his dry lips. They mean to destroy him, or the forces around him will tear him apart long before the dawn breaks over the eastern horizon.

Long fingers make their demand, when Thor chooses to rise from the seat. He needs only a step to close the distance, holding his fingertips to the underside of Bucky's chin. He pushes up enough to bring eye contact further, and there are far too many vectors for a single approach. "Breathe..." And the Asgardian does, oxygen perfumed by the stain of sins and revelation, temptation and sanctified question even if the sculpted curve of his mouth is but inches and less from the soldier's own.

The flick of Kara's hair on Bucky’s shoulder adjusts as she kisses his jugular and slides away, another row of blazing lines cavorting down to the shoulder and easing back. It may burn, but then is there anything to be ashamed of when worship of the mortal frame is fully within her warm hands? "I won't stop. Not until you are asking me to keep going, pleading with me not to cease."

There's that wide-eyed stare, gaze captured by Thor's own again, pale and faded by comparison. He's still again, save for the shivering. He gulps air like a fish, for a few breaths, the salt of sweat beneath Kara's lips, and closes his eyes. Trying again to hold those images. What he can't reach for, for himself, he can build up for someone else.

"Not until you take what you want," Thor agrees, smirking faintly. "We can hold you to an edge for days, and we will. If that is what it takes to have you."

It's the antithesis of his conditioning: warmth, beauty, beguiling scents. But his body's still handily fighting him and those lures, and he's all piano-wire tension and lips well on their way to being bitten ragged. "This hurts," he says, faintly, and his tone is oddly matter of fact. "I know it's meant to feel good. Or would to someone else. It'd be easier if you were trying to hurt me."

“Do you want us to?” asks the prince.

Thor's fingers bracket the underside of Bucky's jaw, in a place where the slightest slip and an additional of pressure might send the man spiraling off into unconsciousness. Tilting the soldier's head this way and that, he might seem to be seeking the ideal angle for a sculpture. In some ways, he is. He knows the value of this human clay, the hidden fissures that might make an unruly block of marble impossible to work with. It's with that burning regard he finds himself unable to resist the tangled emotions colouring the mortal’s pained expression, the plea writ large in those narrowed eyes and hardened jaw. He can't help himself. He bends and kisses Bucky, a hard, lingering demand without an iota of relief or surcease. It hurts.

His breath is still a half-panicked flutter against Thor's skin. That he was not expecting, nor that it raises the tenor of the conditioning's objections to those original touches. Some of the staff were more right than they knew when teasing James about how he looks at the boss. His pulse is aflicker beneath Thor's fingers, but any sound of protest or assent is stifled.

"Fight it," Kara whispers softly. "We’re here with you every step of the way, as far as you want to go." The notes hang heavy and ponderous on her voice, sorrow and just enough wrath to make her sweet touch all the crueler. Nails rake down Bucky’s bare chest, catching the cut lines of muscle and sparing nothing for the taut flesh. Oil blunts the sharpness a little that sears down the flat nub of his nipple, and her teeth sink into his shoulder, an admonishment that might just break the surface. Kara, cousin to the rusalka and the siren, has sharp canine teeth. "Easier isn't what we do," she murmurs, a voluptuary alternating along the sharp edge and then the soft, almost tender in pulling his arms back to pinion him between the god and the valkyrie. That has to hurt the shoulder joints, no matter how supple, but then is there not a tenderness in brushing back his hair while Thor drowns on mortality's flame, demanding his due as he will?

Somehow the deliberate pain, raking nails, teeth making their crescent of marks in the meat of the shoulder still made of flesh, a mouth on his too rough, both shoulders pulled just a little out of joint doesn't so much add to the pain of conditioning being activated as provide a counterpoint, almost a point of balance between. That kind he knows how to dive under like a swimmer ducking beneath a wave too big to be surfed. It's not that the fight goes out of him, for it's still definitely there, in the straining of his shoulders against Kara's grip, but there's no blind lashing out. This is a conscious ceasing of resistance.

Bucky’s rough breathing punctuates the moment. For all Thor kisses hard enough to bruise, his objectives are invariably to steal a sensation and erase all tracks of time for a mortal brought partway into his eternity. Strong fingers hold fast to Bucky's chin, his hand as inviolate as time itself. When his mouth tears away finally, he turns the soldier's head to Kara.

There's a moment of her radiant, silvery-moon eyes flashing with a longing almost too deep and inhuman to endure. She nips at the corner of Bucky’s mouth, the inward nibble tugging on his lower lip. Her hands are considerably stronger than most in holding Bucky's elbows almost together, holding up that tension point he can't necessarily escape.

He doesn’t struggle so much as writhe to the roughness, compliant and crackling with razor-bright attentiveness. Sharp teeth graze his lip, her tongue flashing against his teeth while the unexpected addition of Thor’s fingers curling through the silky weight of his dark hair strikes on stinging nerves brought to higher sensitivity. Between the two of them, he barely notices that he wears thin scratches, marks of claiming from the valkyrie that tactically establish a claim of a kind. Kara's not all gentleness, for all that her touch can kindle the blood: literally. It lies within her province to command. Blood is liquid, liquid is hers to command, heating slightly, stirring the faster.

He groans aloud, a confused mingling of discomfort and need.

"Focus," says the god of thunder. His tone isn't hoarse so much as a shadow, dragging down from that halcyon height. "What hurts is a lie. You've been taught to believe in an illusion, a lie. When she's riding you, doesn’t it feel good? Your body knows it." To make the point, he tugs rather hard on the loose, dark hair mingled to the gold and strawberry blonde.

Redheads, always a weakness, ever since the Forties. Kara's touch to blood itself has him flushing all over, the uneven rosy blotches blooming up unevenly: the dual crescent of teeth marks is already blushed scarlet. He stares at Thor, dazed into something like docility, for the moment, before that nip has him turning his head to her, though there are more of those spastic movements of pain, as if someone else were running current along his nerves.

When true pain shows up, they're both operating in tandem, the unforgiving swerve of the god's hands making progress in their track down the arch of Bucky's spine and back up again. Oil doesn't give measurable friction, and the strength to snap bones is instead just hard enough to counter muscles hardening to miserable tension. Kara retreats a few steps, as it were, letting the plateau of discomfort level off before proceeding again. She perches on her knees on the lounge, eyes hooded and thoughtful.

It's a strange analog to labor, learning to relax back into the moments where the pain's on the way out. Letting incipient exhaustion work as a goad, Bucky breathes out each time. Some sort of trust establishes itself between him and the two Asgardians despite those inlaid attempts to keep physical contact from being any way to bond.

So terribly patient, those who aren't tied into the realm of temporary cares. No one is in a rush when they have millennia ahead of them and as many behind, barring anything terrible from transpiring. Cue tempered tiptoes of pushing at those boundaries, whether by teasing at Bucky's senses through a persistent shift of motion or role reversals.

Who is it branding the back of his neck with an unexpected kiss or the hands that mold his skin with caresses and kneading almost to the point of pain? He is left to float in the twilit spaces where sure enough, it might just be Kara perched next to him, or Thor's lap that he occupies while the valkyrie watches him with wide, measured eyes before deciding where to strike. Time ticks to a gelid crawl. There's no compunction about shoving him over, face down on the lounge, to make it that much harder to see who does what, to be reduced to feeling. Illusions are constructs of the mind, but the senses are old, and they can be undone.

There are times when fingers sink deep enough to feel the metal reinforcements under the skin, interwoven carefully with muscle and rooted to bone. The old cliche about the iceberg applies, when it comes to how much of the work done on him can be seen. A moment of tension ripples alive when he's turned over, the first real impulse to resist. His spine goes taut as a string of beads for one long, lasting moment.

But then he is belly-down, reaching to curl his own fingers around the lower edges, a cat sinking its claws in as if in refusal to be moved.

Bucky has a moment when they both come into focus. Just the bartender, just the owner of the club, their heads together and shoulders pressed beside one another like a pair of youths plotting a little trouble. Freckled nose and slightly asymmetric cheekbones give Kara her character, her smile as clear and guileless as a forest pool. Thor has his arm around her shoulder, and they clearly rest on the ground, on their knees.

"How's it going?" is perhaps the peculiarly casual question from the relaxed strawberry-blonde minx. "Would a glass of water help? We don't do drugs, I'm afraid." Even the compassion there is slanted with the eclipsed ache showing in the way her bruised lips need, want. Never mind the tips of her canines: fang-sharp, pearl-white. They're mostly restrained, but not perfectly.

The Asgardian prince assesses with the calculations of a man who has and does and will rule a realm. "If it were up to me, you'd be tumbled with her until you're too tired to stand." His mouth hooks into a vaguely higher shape, but those eyes are devilishly deep and unfathomably warm. "Do you want this, James? If I take you apart bit by bit, with that lovely vision to put you back together, do you say yea or nay?"

Bucky rolls on to his side, blinking at them with the vague, exhausted surprise of a shipwrecked sailor confronted with rescuers waiting for him on the strand. "I could use some water, yeah," he agrees, voice hoarse, eyes heavy-lidded. "Please," he tacks on. Manners, manners. The line of his mouth firms, for a moment. Considering, inasmuch as he can give anything serious thought with his body aching and his brain buzzing like a skep of bees. Then he nods, sits up carefully, and holds out his hands to them, palm up.

"Be right back." Kara gets up with a light assist from Thor, an effort on his part so reflexive he probably doesn't even think of the consequences. A lighter being might go sailing through the roof. Outside night is in full swing over New York, shining beads of copper and amber among the lurid glow. Such gems are temporal and timeless.

No fridge to speak of decorates the room, the chamber kitted out for the purposes of relaxation -- or assisted mutual destruction, apparently. The valkyrie knows where she is headed, though, into the main terrace where there is a private bar and a carafe she carries back in, balancing a tray of glasses on her arm. "Drink this slow and sparing. We're..."

Laughter ripples from Thor, filling the chamber. "Fucking intense souls, or intense fucking souls." He does have a sense of humour, after all. The glass of water is no sooner extended to Bucky than the god’s eyes are ablaze with the light of galaxies in miniature, a sharp scent of ozone on the air.

Kara yelps; there's the black leather pants and the shirt going up in entropic dust, unspooling from around her body. Bucky's pants really didn't have a hope, either, not with the artless smirk of the feline who commands the storm and burns away cloth. "Better. As you were." He's back to his seat, the only fully clothed one, dragging it forward until he's just barely within arm's reach to watch. At first, anyway.

Bucky leans forward for the glass, and has it in his hand when Thor decides to take a hand in the proceedings directly. Buck immediately curls up like a startled armadillo, knees coming up, nearly dropping the water. His eyes have gone wide, and he informs the god of thunder, plaintively, "I bought those at Macy's."

His other hand is in the process of reaching for his t-shirt as some kind of sop to modesty, before conscious consideration informs him that if he tries that, he's going to lose the shirt, as well. "I coulda just taken 'em off," He's gone bright red again. This is better than a cold cell, but clothing is psychological armor.

"I _liked_ those pants," protests Kara in equal stead, and there are the mirror images both put out by their boss destroying their wardrobe. Only fair, though she isn't exactly pulling a Venus and trying to modestly conceal herself. She stands on her painted toes, the glittery gold flecks showing in the light. "All because you couldn't wait."

Thor shrugs, not the least bit likely to complain. "Work expense. Consider your stipend to replace them already approved," he offers with casual ease, grinning, curling his fingers. He sinks back further into the seat, his feet braced before him. "I am exercising marvelous restraint, James. But even my patience has limits." Nope, not an iota of regret about it. "You have nothing to be ashamed of. You can consider me perhaps the foremost connoisseur on what looks good, and what doesn't on Midgard, unparalleled among any in the Nine Realms."

He finishes simply, "You are incredibly appealing as you are. Don't have shame. Besides, you've been testing her restraint to the limits."

Bucky hides his embarrassment as much as he can in the glass, but he's red to the hairline. So much for the fairly shameless youth of memory. Then he's eyeing Kara sidelong, before looking down at the floor for a moment. "Restraint?" he asks, tone decidedly skeptical. The first time he's really challenged Thor this evening. There are goosebumps marching over his skin, though the room is comfortable enough.

Kara puts her fingers to her lips, a measure of modesty where humility is a sin, unwelcome traveler urged upon its way. "I’m Vanir. We embody life and growth, even as valkyries," she murmurs, not quite turning her face away from him, though her cheeks would be flaming a soft shell pink if it weren't her essential nature to be gladly what she is. "I'd rather reduce you to gasping putty on the lounge and straddle your hips until you're tearing free of those self-imposed limitations to bury yourself fully inside me, but it's not polite. Not for this." Her smile lifts slightly. "Or, if you prefer, let you burn under his touch and slake the things you cannot hope to say except in fractured sounds of pleasure against my lips. Nothing is more delightful than the thought of you being free of that nasty little bit they stuck in your head. It's an offense to all I am."

Thor gestures with his fingers, tapping the long digits against the arm of the chair. "That's the poetic way of saying she's on her best behaviour when she'd rather passionately and wildly fuck you right there on the chaise. Of course, there's all night." He draws his tongue over his lower lip, memory asserting itself there. "That does beckon an idea." And like the slow, golden master of the savannah, he slides forward in the seat until their knees almost touch. His fingers skate up the metal arm, drawing it forward, the burning hue of his gemstone eyes focused. Winter and summer, briefly caught in the flashpoint of a touch.

Whatever hue of embarrassment and current refusal to uncurl his lower half,he hasn't fled yet, or fought them in earnest. Bucky is wise enough to realize when there's no real fight if they don't accept a genuine refusal, but no one has, not yet. He lets Thor draw it forward, the plates whispering over each other, no scraping. It's cool and smooth and polished.

Embarrassment, what a charming proposition. Water he drinks, if a bit shakily, and appreciates the surroundings for a few seconds to get his composure, whatever scraps remain. Does he want this?

For all the echoes of imposed pain still flicker over his skin, something else blossoms, a heat in the blood he hasn’t felt in too long. It hardly has a name, a stranger in his own skin. Lust.

Not so long ago that he was on his stomach on the leather chaise and now he's standing barefooted and bare-knows-all-else before them. Kara sighs, averting her gaze for a moment. Her smile is knowledgeable, rueful. Her time will come.

Thor, however, is the one querying for his consent, questioning possibility. His brows raise and Bucky puts the cup aside among the bric-a-brac on the table, half-hoping he judged the distance correctly. “Please.” Just one word has to be enough.

More than enough. He pulls Bucky to him with that effortless drag, assessing through the slight tip of his head to the side. Thoughts brighten his summer-blue eyes, speckled with mercurial highlights. So many ways one might do this, asserting a measure of dominance or a slow, patient coil of a cobra ready to strike. Does the wolf come close enough to be seized by the throat, or will he explore?

The prince's hand rests at Bucky's shoulder to steady him as Kara grabs a length of silk from whom knows where, another drawer. Quite a peaceful scenario, as Thor leans forward. Their lips might as well be meeting. They aren't. A touch warm as candle flame promises but gives no contact.

There's that animal fascination again - James is usually far more lupine than anything else. But he's been prey, and that gut instinct knows it here. That fighting is going to be futile. He doesn't look up from his feet -- his bare feet. The boots were kicked off early, at least. But nor is he trying to cover anything with his hands. This is disturbingly like some of the very early evaluations, the scientists and techs doing their bit in the dehumanization of their subjects. Equipment has no sense of modesty, no personal space to invade.

No modesty, no, and certainly no hint of personal dimensions. It's not much different from someone of flesh and blood, or close enough to count. But Thor isn't the same. He can wield his presence like a knife or a nuclear bomb, and he chooses neither. Poised as they are, it's so easy for him to rub his smooth cheek against Bucky's or bury his face in the shadowy welter of hair that hasn't known clippers or scissors in ever so long. The trapped heat is appealing, of course, and so is there the scent that marks the man; something metallic, masculine clean.

Bucky otherwise eschews scent. Soap, shampoo, a faint trace of cigarette smoke from the patrons, a just as faint trace of sweat, and of course, the metal and oil tang of the arm that the warmth brings out. In other words, he smells like a weapon, no matter what. He doesn't recoil or lift a hand to maintain any kind of distance, but nor does he look up, yet. Breath still fast and shallow, but that blush has subsided.

The flicker of a grin passes and goes. Is it felt? Thor doesn't know and frankly doesn't care, taking his damn time about exploring. He returns to that waiting position, overshadowing Bucky. Anyone looking through the window wouldn't see either of them; a sheen of rippling light deflects from the exterior only, the inner reaches of the chamber cloaked in tinted invisibility for a sense of privacy.

"James." One word, almost hoarse, is full of all the promise that he can possibly register. Kara slips up from behind, but she doesn't touch. Not yet. Not quite.

There's a shudder from Bucky -- not of revulsion or even of chill, but the sort of nervous shedding of energy like a horse trying to drive off a fly. His hands are still loose at his sides, though, no attempt to wrap his arms around himself. At his name, he looks up halfway, eyeing Thor from under his brows. "Thor," he says, in reply, as if testing the word, the name. "That's really your name?"

"Entirely." The dark stormlight simmering in his eyes is offset by the bright gold of his hair, and the reality he is only in semblance human, Asgardian origins blazing through. His finger traces down Bucky's jawline, catching beneath the hard line of his chin. Bravery has its reward, at least. "Thor Odinson, the god of thunder. Prince of Asgard. The All-Father’s reckless son. Exactly whom I claim to be." He brushes his mouth over the third eye chakra between those uncertain, grave brows but doesn't deliver with that gesture any divine revelation.

"Why do you own a bar in New York?" Bucky has to ask. Has been wondering it since that since Steve secured him this job and made the fated introduction, putting him in the path of the crown prince of another dimension, some floating realm straight out of story. Raising his head, he shakes it a little to get the hair away from his face. No wonder he never wears it loose.

"Because why not." More questions have to be coming. Thor chuckles. Kara isn't immune to touch; she reaches back to put a warm hand on Bucky's other shoulder and pulls his hair aside, finding the mark she left on his neck with a sigh. Oh goodness, more. The prince adds, "Centuries prowling around Asgard and her sister realms grows tedious. I had enough adventure waiting for me upon Midgard. Think of all the benefits." A turn of his face marks his profile with all his sublime perfection. After a moment's notice, he arches an eyebrow at Bucky. Yep. That's a dare.

A nice, orderly arc of teeth marks, red and bruised, are worn on the mortal’s shoulder. Far prettier than the ridged scarring of the graft. Buck glances back at her and doesn't smile, but there's a flicker of humor behind the mask. "Benefits?" he asks, brows up, turning back to Thor.

She can't help it; the temptation warrants putting her head on Bucky's shoulder for a moment. One naked soul knows another, even if hers is the apotheosis of an idea and a concept, an era. Kara eventually slips back, biding her time for all that his furtive desire welling up among his tangled emotions is like dangling a steak in front of a 21-year-old Marine.

"Respect. Recognition. Heroic acts and fine company, just like this." Thor leans forward again, that single act shutting down further inquiry. "If I can give you glory, I will, by hook or by crook." Enter a kiss, the wolf striking, demanding and urgent and driven by a goad he can't name. He needs to make things right and reorder the most grievous wrong. Surely that is enough.

No more questions. That kiss makes his knees weaken, again, and Bucky slides an arm around Thor's neck, not an attempt at throttling but a plea for support. This time, there's a tentative yielding, even as those tremors of pain recur. Less than before, though, as if the act of choosing to submit is that first little fissure in the wall. His lips part, as though he might give invitation by silent will alone.

Bucky has yet to learn that he can't strangle Thor. Still, the added weight wrapped around him speaks volumes on a silent wavelength. While the valkyrie sighs her approval, the god shifts, pushing the chaise with its two passengers back several inches. Is it enough to say 'Good?' Yes, but in the oldest lingua franca known to the mankind. Thor groans faintly, and that yielding as his cock stirs to building hardness is enough to bring Kara a frisson of delight. _There_ the passionate hue is, the rallying cry of surrender that causes the Kara to slide her hand between her legs.

The clash of gold and dusk mingle together, Thor pouring out effort in kisses and touches bit by bit to widen the mental aperture. His mouth is hot, tasting of wine and sunlight, molten to the bittersweet pressure applied. There's nothing to be shunned here.

There are moments where he genuinely wonders if all this current life isn't just some extended, intricate delusion, and James Barnes is a catatonic object of pity decently interred in a VA psych ward among the other victims of profound shellshock.

But this feels real enough, in that most visceral sense. The other arm spans Thor's ribs, trying to hold himself up before his legs buckle entirely. The noises he's making, it's hard to tell if pleasure or pain sits at the root until his muscles turn to water and he's more or less collapsing at the prince's feet. Not unconscious, though, but definitely stunned.

Thor doesn’t accept that involuntary tribute but holds the mortal up like a girl with a too-big doll. He does not want worship. There will be no going down on one's knees before him unless driven by lust or desire or love, and then, the act is different. Reverence isn't the same as stunned regard. Besides. There _is_ something about Bucky on his knees that goes to the marrow of Thor’s being, a fever pang that turns to granite and adamantine, stiff and unbowed and forged by the fires of self.

An arm around his waist, then, keeps Bucky up. While he's stunned, so does Kara strike, looping the silk tie around his shoulders and pulling his hair back in a quick, easy knot. Kindness. The hot spill of oil running down his back, brought from one of those little vials scattered about, might be a surprise, but it has a bit of a camphor-like effect; relaxing as it heats up, for one. The slow beads trail below Thor's arm along the spine, down the tailbone into the cleft of Bucky’s ass.

She only has to sit back and wait, watching. The hunger is feline; Thor simply shares that kiss until happenstance stops them. Another swing at the conditioning to follow, the third and fourth and seventh caresses.

Such gentleness wasn’t expected at all. Bucky startles, but there's a good deal less flinching now, resting his weight on Thor, even as Kara gets a tentative little smile.

"Can we sit down again?" he asks, in a whisper, though there's no one else close enough to hear who isn't part of the trio of conspirators. Off-balance to the point of intoxication, fear and pain and anger and what wants so very much to be pleasure a spike as potent as any drug.

Even if Thor were inclined to disagree -- and he never would -- he doesn't have a choice. A nudge from the sinuous bartender seals the decision, insisting on the chaise. Ladies first might apply given their situation. Kara scoots as far as the end, sitting on Bucky's abandoned t-shirt, helpful given she could otherwise fall right off.

The prince allows Bucky to settle where and how he will of his own volition. Oil leaves a sheen to his forearm, and he eyes it mildly enough. Flexing his knee, Thor leans onto the chaise, and bless its construction, it holds up quite well with a protesting squeak and groan. "Get yourself comfortable. I'll place myself accordingly."

She's like a cat, insisting on attention by curling up on his clothes. But Bucky settles himself demurely in the middle, still sitting across the chaise as if it were a bench. The pupils of his eyes have dilated a little, losing the pinspot effect of fear and adrenaline. The faintest swelling at one corner of his lower lip comes courtesy of those rougher kisses. The sight is nearly enough to madden his companions both. It only hastens their actions.

Of course he would be in balance, with the god on one shoulder and the other ridden by the valkyrie. Bucky has already enjoyed the supple leather and it's not much different now with Thor seated beside him. Kara tries not to spook Bucky, though she leans subtly in his direction, knees pointed to the soldier. Her hand gently rests on his for a moment, a sign of support as much as a lifeline, because Thor takes no prisoners and knows no mercy.

Both hands in Bucky's hair pull tight on the scalp, locks grabbed in handfuls. The arrested kiss isn't hard enough to hurt, but it does require a twist to the torso, an incline back to meet him. He leans over, his cotton shirt pressed to skin scratched, massaged, and oiled. Any regret for causing discomfort will have to come after the fact. Having zeroed in on something that Bucky responds to, the prince plays that hand again.

One hand reaches for Kara. Bucky twines his fingers around hers and grips hard as if she were a lifeline. At least it isn't the hand made of metal. That's splayed on the lounge for a moment, before it winds Thor again, trying to keep his balance. Only a little wince at his hair being grabbed, it’s no wonder he used to keep it so short. While caught between them, secure and finally starting to rise, he starts to gasp for air again, his heartbeat speeding, chest heaving. Piece by piece they’re undoing him.

He would be shocked to find himself harder than he’s been in memory, cock rigid and pointing up straight towards his shirt, if he could spare the thought.

The metal hand won't break bones, and Kara is a font of healing. The valkyrie endures more force, freeing Bucky from suppressing himself for fear of hurting others or causing harm. Her palm presses into his, her fingers curled around his damp with the slightest trace of her nectar. The wild briar of lake-and-wood doesn't hesitate to bite the pad of his thumb to set his shaft visibly throbbing.

They begin again with the sonorous orchestral movements of creaking leather and shifting weight, sighs and gasps music to the immortal soul. Thor releases that firm grip with one hand, running broad fingers down the nape and along the back of Bucky's neck. He explores every contorted line and scar with a painter's diligence, guiding him, pulling him up slightly and shoving him back into the cradle of Kara's embrace. Their lips don't remain separate for long, only pulling back to help measure the arrested ascent. Mustn't break him. Yet.

Thor is the first to feel something shift, a first tentative notching from mere passive assent to a reply. Kissing back, rather than letting it be done to him. Bucky still courts fear, a little, but at least some part of him is trying to find a way to enjoy this. He leans back against Kara, the warmth of her enveloping him, a narcotic that slips underneath the surface. His arousal hurts in a totally different way, and he dares not look down. All of this is new, unfamiliar territory.

Kara’s legs neatly flank the two men, bent at the knees and offering a space within. She has enough musculature and core definition to tolerate reclining with virtually no wobble beyond the norm. Soft hands smooth up to Bucky's shoulders and squeeze, enough to echo the earlier masseuse's art, and hold him fast against the warmth of her naked body. She is the nymph to the storm, the solid beat of her heart accelerated considerably by excitement, a steady accompaniment.

“Fuck,” all that Bucky can say, shuttled between the pair of them.

Thor shakes his head slightly, but he rewards the plea in a different way, a flick of the tongue to reward courage, and the upward creep of the cotton shirt. David is his masterpiece, the flawed, dangerously hard block of marble being shaped. "Good," he murmurs, barely heard, running his palm down the man's side across his ribs to his hip and stopping. Back up again. Nothing venturing further. All in its own course; if Bucky wants, he's going to have to start tactically advancing, as he is.


End file.
